The latest live TV adventure for Noel Edmonds is a full throttle affair, run to the second, with the host editing his own intro copy down to the wire. Live trails are recorded for insertion into ad breaks preceding the show, which is a bewildering piledrive of current affairs, loaded questions and campaigning zest. The audience are whipped up into a frenzy by a warm-up man, his style rooted in the Cockney redcoat. ‘I’m going to call you Spanner’, he tells one lucky audience member, ‘because every time I look at you, my nuts tighten’.
Indeed. The lucky lady later receives a bottle of booze for her troubles. Gay jokes abound, as well as the odd ricochet about women putting their legs together. It’s not for the politically correct, and may not even be allowed at the BBC – but, in a carnival sense, it works. An energy sweeps across the room, and before you know it, we are air guitaring to Bohemian Rhapsody, strumming our Noel’s HQ foam fingers, plastic union jacks aloft in patriotic fervour. It’s the sort of rabble-rousing frenzy that fuels the show’s fevered sense of righteous outrage.
At one point, when pursuing a local council to overturn a refusal for planning permisson for a disabled army hero, Noel becomes visibly enraged. The council’s press officer has had the nerve to describe his show as ‘entertainment’ and refused a response. Mr Edmonds launched into a full scale tirade direct to camera, claiming that he does not take a penny for Noel’s HQ (his day job, Deal Or No Deal probably pays quite well) and waves several letters, claiming the backing of Nick Clegg, David Cameron and Prime Minister Gordon Brown in his endeavours. (A later broadcast of the show featured a less specific version of the rage, according to The Guardian, reportedly triggering a threat to quit from Noel. Intriguingly, the newspaper also claims that a second series of the show has not yet been confirmed – yet the audience were asked to film trailers for it during the live recording.)
Otherwise the host is a cool, calm, collected presence, wandering the stage during ad breaks and shaking hands with audience members. Keith ‘Cheggers’ Chegwin bounds about like nobody’s business, embracing Noel and firing a snow cannon; one particularly keen lady pursues him for an interview; through all this, Noel strides with unflappable cool. By the end of the show, such is the enthusiasm of the crowd that some are seen smuggling foam fingers out of the studio under their jackets – but security are vigilant. These fingers will be needed for his next 500 strong army.
UPDATE: Mr Edmonds’s salary for the series is paid into a trust for use in charitable endeavours, it seems.
News hour, with Jerry Caesar 