How TV's great survivor Noel Edmonds is taking on Jeremy Clarkson
'We're not trees,' says Noel Edmonds in his new TV series. 'We can move.' Hard to argue with that as a rationale, yet hot-footing it 11,500 miles away to put down virgin roots in New Zealand was also partly so that the septuagenarian TV star could get as far away from Britain as humanly possible. But don't go thinking that means we've reciprocally got shot of the host of Noel's House Party, Deal or No Deal? and Multi-Coloured Swap Shop. Oh no.
If there's one lesson we have learnt by now, it's never to write off Noel; he's television's great survivor. And so it proves, as he returns this week in ITV1's antipodean answer to Clarkson's Farm, Noel Edmonds' Kiwi Adventure, which follows his attempts to run a pub, vineyard and wellness centre on 800 acres of land at the tip of the South Island. But can Edmonds challenge Clarkson?
Both men have presented Top Gear, yet where Clarkson's appeal could probably be summed up by this outburst in the fourth series of his hit Amazon show – 'Turns out I'm not Jethro Tull, I'm just a hapless f---wit' – Edmonds's hold over the British public is more mysterious, rather like his age-defying powers. 'People say, 'Well, what's your secret?' And I say, 'Well, I've been researching it for 76 years,'' he quips. Cold showers, ice baths and mystic crystals, it turns out, all have a role to play.
Of course, Edmonds is happy to be the butt of the joke, and Kiwi Adventure has great fun sending up his eccentricity and David Brent-like self-belief. For example, his pub – The Bugger Inn – serves locally-brewed drinks, with names such as Boring B-----d, Hop Licker, Old Git, T-ts Up and Dickens Cider ('Very popular,' says Noel, 'particularly with the ladies'). The show also introduces his wife, Liz Davies, whom he met when she was a stand-in make-up artist on Deal or No Deal? This happened at 11.06 on October 6, 2006, as will become obvious to anyone who watches Kiwi Adventure. The couple married three years later, and Davies proves a likeable foil. 'Somebody's got to look after him… it's my little bit of care in the community,' she says in the show.
But what exactly is Edmonds's secret? Well, let's start at the beginning, when this headmaster's son from Ilford in Essex thought he'd blown his big chance to be a DJ after leaving his news-reading job on the pirate station Radio Luxembourg. Some say it was because of the stinking fish that he'd taped to the underside of his boss's desk, but Edmonds always maintained that he quit.
It wasn't the end, though, of his pranks or his ambitions. In fact, it was just early training for the role of comeback king. Edmonds would wash up at Radio One in 1969, making programme trailers, before his unruffled voice and manner recommended him as a stand-in presenter. In 1970, he took over Kenny Everett's Saturday show and in 1973, he was handed the coveted Breakfast Show, which he made his own for five years and described as 'of its kind, the most important radio show in the world' when he appeared on Desert Island Discs in 1978.
This was the era of the superstar DJ, and Edmonds had scooped the pool. He was attractive and trendy, with his long-but-not-too-long hair and tidy beard. He looked and sounded like a young version of the suave cats that ruled the TV studios. He also had the de rigueur terrible taste in music that Radio One demanded for the daytime hours. He was, though, really good at his job, polished and creative.
And he was sillier than those suave cats, more influenced by the radio comedy of Round the Horne and Kenny Everett than the laconic wit of the day. His radio show featured invented characters, such as the lascivious milkman Flynn, and playful prank calls to members of the public. Children's TV seemed a logical next step. He left the Breakfast Show in April 1978, and launched the Saturday morning show Multi-Coloured Swap Shop on BBC One that October. If the concept was a little thin – kids rang up with something they wanted to swap – Edmonds's engaging personality (and able sidekicks Keith Chegwin and Maggie Philbin) turned it into a phenomenon, creating the sort of magazine-style children's show that would dominate for the next two decades.
It was also very polite, very BBC, in comparison with the absolute anarchy of Tiswas on ITV, where Edmonds's future gameshow rival Chris Tarrant mucked about, poured gunk over children and had punk and heavy metal bands on to play in the studio.
Edmonds set his sights on an adult audience when he left Swap Shop in 1982 to host The Late, Late Breakfast Show. It aired in the Saturday early evening slot on BBC One, and took a while to find its feet, but with the right sidekick in place – fellow car-racing enthusiast Mike Smith, who'd once lent Noel his race car, which he had promptly crashed – Edmonds's rise would continue apace.
Occasionally, his way of making fun of his guests could come across as charmless, as when Abba appeared on the show in 1982 and Edmonds, after receiving a kiss on the lips from Agnetha Fältskog, cheekily insulted each member in turn. When Agnetha and Anni-Frid Lyngstad professed frustrations with how they were depicted in the English press, with Agnetha declaring, 'I'm more than a sexy bottom', and Anni-Frid icily quoting, 'I am 'alarmingly ageing'.' Edmonds was soon joking about her being old and saying 'we get a little bit of sexy bottom' on Fernando. 'Is it necessary?' Agnetha replied. The band split up one month later.
Then came the first major setback in a career that had made Edmonds one of the most famous celebrities in Britain. In its 'Give it a Whirl' strand, the show was playing with fire; it was a stunt segment performed by a volunteer from the public after just a few days of training. One viewer had broken her shoulder having been fired from a cannon, and the government's Health and Safety Executive (HSE) had intervened to stop another dangerous endeavour going ahead. A professional stunt driver had also been badly injured in a calamitous Evel Knievel-style attempt to jump over parked cars in a Jensen Interceptor. DJ John Peel, helming the outside broadcast, fell silent after what appeared to be a fatal incident. Edmonds visibly swallowed as he tried to maintain a veneer of calm when the show was handed back to him.
Yet even after that shocking example – the Jensen had no roll cage and was at risk to concertina if the jump went wrong – in 1986, a death did occur. A volunteer who had phoned in – 24-year-old Michael Lush – was killed in the very first rehearsal of a bungee jump from a box strung from a crane. No airbag had been provided in case the stunt went wrong; the connecting clip sprang loose and Lush fell to his death. Three days later the BBC announced on air that the episode – and all future ones – had been cancelled.
The inquest recorded a verdict of misadventure, and magistrates in a later prosecution by the HSE imposed a £2,000 fine and chose not to refer the case to crown court, where the levy could have been unlimited. Although Edmonds was not to blame for the failures that led to Lush's death, he was tarnished by the event.
He reportedly considered quitting TV but continued to host the Telly Addicts TV gameshow, to which he owned the rights, although it took another two years before his return to the big time, in 1988, with The Noel Edmonds Saturday Roadshow.
That series was directed by Michael Leggo, who saw in Edmonds a TV natural. 'He's just got a sparkle in his eyes. They come alight on camera,' he tells me. 'And he's very good at putting people at their ease. He might get up to a bit of mischief, but it's good fun, it's not malicious… a bit like a good best man speech at a wedding.'
He contrasts Edmonds's 'Gotchas' – hidden camera tricks played on the public and celebrities, such as DJ Dave Lee Travis – with the crueller set-ups of Jeremy Beadle on Game for a Laugh. Edmonds had been teasing people on the radio since the mid-1970s, yet today even his gentler japes would be unlikely to make it past Ofcom's strictures on contributor welfare that were introduced in 2020.
The Roadshow effected a partial restoration of Edmonds's pulling power, but the series that he and Leggo dreamt up next – Noel's House Party – which launched in 1991 and ran for eight years, would propel him to the summit of light entertainment.
It was filmed live, taking advantage of Edmonds's plate-spinning gifts, which by this time were so well developed that when Leggo turned the 'Gotcha' tables on the presenter and had him rehearse an entirely fake show the day before, leaving him to wing it on air, the producer says he knew that they could get away with it. 'I wouldn't have dared do that to anyone else, because multi-segmented live television – where you've got to be able to move swiftly from one thing to another – it's hard enough when you know what's coming next, bloody impossible when you don't.'
The show, set in the fictional village of Crinkley Bottom, was like a greatest hits compilation of everything that had worked for Noel in the past, with an added anarchic edge. It regularly attracted 18 million viewers, thanks at least in part the infamous presence of Mr Blobby. The character began life as a felt tip doodle by Leggo, but would gradually take over the show (and top the charts at Christmas in 1993).
At first, Noel wore the pink and yellow spotted costume to catch out unsuspecting celebrities, but Mr Blobby soon took on riotous life of his own. He could later be found wrestling Edmonds to the floor of the studio and causing mayhem that would be copied in playgrounds around the land. Leggo knows it is an unusual legacy. 'I said to my sons, ages ago, when I go, you can put anything on my headstone, except for 'Blobby, blobby, blobby',' he tells me, 'And my youngest said, 'We'll see about that.''
When ratings finally dropped off, the Beeb retired the show; the Crinkley Bottom theme parks that Edmonds had set up in the mid-'90s had failed; and it seemed that finally Noel's race might have been run. Not so. In 2005, he was back with what seemed like a fairly low-rent daytime show, Deal or No Deal?, based on a Dutch format. Edmonds took it seriously, made the whole thing fun, and a huge hit was born.
Along the way, he became a proponent of 'cosmic ordering', explaining it was a form of manifestation: '[You] say to the cosmos... 'This is what I'd like''. He also advocated an electromagnetic therapy device which he said 'slows ageing, reduces pain... and tackles cancer' and launched a radio station, Postively Pets, 'exclusively for our animal chums'.
When Deal or No Deal? was cancelled in 2016, Edmonds made his decision to move to New Zealand, where we now find him.
The money to build his new life came partly from a successful fight against Lloyd's Bank, after a criminal employee pushed Edmonds's Unique business into bankruptcy in the noughties. Displaying the kind of tenacity that's kept his career buoyant, Edmonds had attended Lloyd's AGMs to call out bank bosses and even set up a radio station dedicated to anti-banking messages. After his pay-out, Edmonds commissioned a huge statue of a knight in prayer, named Guardian, from Wētā Workshop to commemorate his own fortitude, which was installed on his New Zealand estate. The inscription on its base reads: 'The devil saw me with my head down and thought he'd won, until I said amen.'
So far, Edmonds' new venture has attracted some hostile press in his chosen outpost, where he has been accused of sacking workers without notice – something he rails repeatedly against in the new show, explaining he was standing them down for the off-season, a standard practice in hospitality.
Let's hope it was just a misunderstanding and that Edmonds can win over the Kiwis as he did so many millions of us at home. Who would bet against Noel's new show defeating the odds again? We shall see.
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