I bumped into bloody Noel Edmonds on the TV tonight. He is presenting a 2-hour retrospective on his old Saturday morning kids' TV show, Swap Shop, on BBC2 as I write.
Back in 2001 or so life was not completely wonderful, but there were nonetheless a few things we could rely on. One was that the Tories would never choose a leader who was actually capable of winning an election. The other was that after the disastrous fizzling out of Noel's House Party at the end of the 90s, Noel Edmonds had been banished to the outer darkness of TV programming, never to return. The jury is still out on the first of these certainties, but the second has been turned on its head thanks to Deal Or No Deal.
I was unfortunate enough to capsize on the daytime TV iceberg which is Deal Or No Deal and I can honestly say it is the biggest turkey I have ever seen. It makes Noel's House Party look like I, Claudius. The outcome - in terms of which sum of money the contestant can pick up at the end, when all the other boxes are opened - is completely random, and yet it is treated like some kind of surgical operation. At least in Who Wants To Be A Millionaire there is some element of skill involved. The only redeeming feature of Deal or No Deal was when Noel had to have the design of the phone changed because he was suffering from Repetitive Strain Injury from answering the phone when the 'banker' rang.
Looking at the clips of Swap Shop tonight, it is obvious that Noel Edmond's TV career has been a steady downward curveball, from "cheesy fun for kids" through to "absolutely fucking awful". There was an upward blip in 1997 when he appeared on Chris Morris's BrassEye, explaining how the killer drug from Prague, "cake", affected the area of the brain known as "Shatner's Bassoon", controlling the perception of time... "a second feels like a month. So the schoolkid in Prague who was mown down by a bus... he thought he had a month to cross the street." But this was disowned rapidly. A mate of mine who runs the BHappY website defends some of Edmonds's output on the grounds that it is, despite everything, "well-structured television". He also sent me a Noel's House Party board game for my birthday, and I've asked various family and friends to play this game to test its structure. They've refused.
Another friend of mine has said that one of the things that makes him most happy in life is the fact that he will outlive Noel Edmonds; that he will see Noel's obituary in print. But given Noel's ability to bounce back from the dead previously, he could be out of luck. Still, maybe Chris Morris has another trick up his sleeve...
2 comments:
What amazes me about Deal or no Deal is that:
(a) they somehow manage to spin out the opening of 22 boxes to a 50 minute programme, and
(b) they all act like it is some kind of evangelical religious experience and that there is some kind of high-level positive-thinking strategy involved in what is, in reality, purely a game of chance.
Of course the whole programme format is classic Game Theory - contestants are being asked to choose between a fixed sum of money or a chance of higher sums. It is then just down to their aversion to or love of risk, or maybe greed over logic.
I've not watched many of these shows, but I have had the extreme satisfaction of seeing some twat go home with 1p because they were convinced they had a quarter of a million in their box. Positive thinking, my arse!
On the subject of Noel Edmonds' career, however, who remembers his first venture into Saturday evening prime time telly - The Late Late Breakfast Show?
The gimick there was that random members of the public were persuaded to carry out death-defying stunts on live TV. The twist was when one such poor bastard failed to defy death - Michael Lush I believe was his name, if memory serves.
Really, that should have been the nail in Noel's coffin (as it was in Lush's). Unfortunately for us, he managed to pick himself up, reinvent the format, and launched Mr Blobby onto the unsuspecting world.
The rest, as they say, is history.
I couldn't have put it better myself! Apparently Noel Edmonds has some kind of positive thinking book out now as well. Er... he thinks positive, the rest of us sell our televisions.
Late Late Breakfast Show - yeah that was on the curveball, as it was extremely bad, but not quite as bad as Noel's House Party. Cancelled in about '87 after that guy died on it, yep. Didn't Noel present the 80s game show "Telly Addicts" as well?
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