Just how does Noel Edmonds keep his whiskers so youthful?
NOEL EDMONDS is fretting. The former Swap Shop and House Party host has remembered a remark his wife Liz made ages ago, about TV presenters being hard work to live with.
‘ I can ’ t believe I’m high maintenance, I really can ’t,’ Noel murmurs, stroking his carefully short-clipped beard in which every individual hair has apparently been dyed rusty orange.
Anyone else might be making a self- deprecating joke, sending themselves up. But if we’ve learned one thing about Noel from Eight Go Rallying: The Road To Saigon (BBC2), it’s that he doesn ’t have a normal sense of humour.
He delights in the manic, unfunny practical jokes or Gotchas that have been his trademark since his Radio 1 days in the Seventies. But his laughter is forced. When he’s not being ‘wacky, onscreen Noel’, he barely smiles.
Everything is very earnest, particularly his belief in aliens and the power of positive thinking to cure cancer. Perhaps it’s positive thinking that keeps his beard and barnet that youthful shade of russet. But all his can- do philosophy couldn’t keep the fanbelt from snapping in his sporty MGB GT, as he and Liz raced through Thailand towards the Cambodian border.
It was typical of this atrociously ill- conceived celebrity show that Noel’s car, supposedly competing in a vintage motor race across South-East Asia, wasn’t carrying a repair kit. Not even a spanner.
That’s far from the least realistic aspect of this farce.
Two of the four celebrity teams have covered most of the course by taxi and hire car . Singer Martin Kemp’s missus Shirley , having rolled and wrecked their vintage Mini, now refuses to travel in anything that doesn ’ t have air-conditioning.
The celebs were sent East on the promise that they would enjoy authentic rallying thrills, while soaking up the atmosphere of an exotic culture. But Shirley turned down one 4x4 motor on the grounds that it smelt of cigarette smoke.
Honestly, what is the point of this show? All reality shows are claptrap, but Celebrity Big Brother is a profound sociological experiment by comparison to this embarrassment.
It’s all so cringingly , shockingly bad that I now understand why Noel flew back from Asia saying he believed the Beeb wouldn’t be able to screen any of it. This will blight the careers of everyone involved, but pop music presenter Miquita Oliver comes out worst. She’s riding with her mother, chef Andi Oliver , and whingeing constantly, like Harry Enfield’s nightmare teen Kevin.
‘God! I am not your puppet!’ she whined at her mum, just because she was asked to try making conversation. Miquita is 34. Thir-tee-four.
The courageous young patients in Paul O’Grady’s Little Heroes (ITV) put her to shame.
Actually, I defy anyone to watch this heart-breaking half -hour documentary from Great Ormond Street children ’s hospital and not be awed at the resilience on show. O’Grady has the inimitable knack of winning a child’s trust. He prattles constantly, but it isn’t what he says, simply his tone and his grin — which is why it works equally well on the animals at Battersea Dogs’ Home.
If he was showboating , the celeb doing a Mother Teresa act, the show would be horrible. But there’s a humility about him as he pops his head around each door. He knows when he’s beaten, too — one little boy with really demanding behaviour was more than he could handle.
He retreated, filled with sympathy and respect for the boy’s saint of a mother . Like an awful lot of viewers, I shared that feeling.
Expert Philip Mould imagined sculptor Henry Moore’s home life on Fake Or Fortune? (BBC1) — ‘up in the evening doing so many drawings, almost like knitting’. Only when he wasn’t darning his socks, surely.