Bunker-vision: View from inside Noel’s HQ

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.

End of the world, by other means; is Jonny Wilkinson the saviour?

Apocalypse – once it was carbon-pumping evil industry’s fault, now it’s down to lending by evil banks. The shift has been from climatic to economic, as represented by HBO’s new series Americatown, originally intended as a saga of immigration in New York, now repurposed as a musing on total US economic collapse and ensuing mass migration. (Think American Chinatowns in every far flung capital, can Britain be far behind? Imagine that, the British quarter in Paris – all greasy chip shops, booze-soaked bars and equestrian shops. I suppose the equivalent already exists across Spain, in the guise of expat communities.)

Britain, meanwhile, is ‘Broken’, according to both Noel Edmonds and The Sun (but not Gordon Brown). The second, smaller leg of Noel’s recent resurgence rests upon his various projects at Sky1, the parent company of which of course, owns The Sun – Broken Britain is clearly a common theme for both of them, and trips of the tongue rather nicely. ‘Slightly misshapen Britain’, ‘Sprained Britain’, or ‘Damaged Britain’ don’t work quite as well. One imagines these were thrashed through in short order at an editorial conference; the beauty of broken is its close association to fix (‘If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it’), on which Noel and his redtop ally are both keen to wax. Even Richard and Judy are getting in on the act. In these troubled times, it’s nice to celebrate the nice; as long as no-one is exploited, who can argue with that?

So far left in the cold by Rupert Murdoch’s newspaper empire, a nonetheless resurgent British Conservative party has developed its own particular take on the problem – David Cameron pledged to mend Britain’s ‘broken society’. Similar, yet different. Whatever their aspirations to broad-based support, the Conservatives probably think themselves a little above alliteration. He was later forced to clarify, claiming that he only meant ‘parts of Britain’ were broken; akin to a human breaking an arm or a leg, perhaps – it would not naturally follow that the entire person was broken. Does Mr Cameron believe that partially disabled people are broken? Does he have an axe to grind against paraplegics? We should be told, certainly before the paralympics. Perhaps he has some horrible plan up his sleeve.

Amid all these differing versions of looming apocalypse and its varying solutions, there lies the path taken by Jonny Wilkinson – drifting between injuries once again, the once-prolific goalkicker appears to be beating the hippy trail, taking the path to enlightenment through Buddhism via quantum physics, and wearing his hair long. How long before he fronts a documentary explaining the discipline, or writes an illustrated pop-up book on the Large Hadron Collider? One for the Christmas list, that.