‘I am Jesus!': the TV brilliance of Noel Edmonds

The Guardian

20-06-2025

He is risen. He is risen indeed. Six years after he huffed off to New Zealand in a hail of tuts, tsks and never-liked-you-anyways, Noel Edmonds has returned to our screens with a message for humanity. 'We're not trees,' he proclaims. 'We can move.' Noel Edmonds – and there can be no doubt that this is very much Noel Edmonds – is referring to his decision to leave the UK with his wife (Liz, 55) in order to establish an 800-acre hospitality business in the sobbingly beautiful South Island idyll of Ngatimoti. He doesn't like Britain any more, he says. It has 'changed'.
But Noel – as his new programme, Kiwi Adventure, makes blisteringly clear – has not changed. He looks like a child's sand drawing of Aslan. He believes in 'the universal energy system', wears combatively tight linen T-shirts and has baths so cold he fears openly for the future of his scrotum. He is a deeply odd man. And yet. From the depths of the oddness re-emerges an imperishable truth: Noel Edmonds, for better or worse, is clinically incapable of making uninteresting TV.
Here, then, are seven of the most notable emissions from the man's party cannon.
'Swap Shopppp,' bugled the theme tune, heralding the all-too-brief golden age of Saturday morning TV, an inflatable neon wonderland in which a jubilantly youthful Noel Edmonds could ask Kate Bush how she got her hair to go like that.
Ferociously watchable studio quiz in which square-eyed families went cardigan-to-cardigan over questions about Blue Peter and Keith Chegwin. The winner? Knitwear. The runner-up? Telly. Noel's stewardship – aggressively serviceable action-slacks, smirk like the judgment of Zeus – would lend much-needed tension to the soft furnishings, thus plunging the McPerms of Perth and the Vauxhall-Cavaliers of Nantwich into a perpetual Scooby Doo-based deathmatch. Bring it back!
Welcome ye to 'Crinkley Bottom,' an illusory fiefdom in which unsuspecting celebrity visitors (Dave Lee Travis, Edwina Currie etc) were greeted with mockery, gunge and often startlingly physical 'gotchas'. Pivotal to the chaos were Noel (presentational style: giggling necromancer) and bubonic familiar Mr Blobby, whose monosyllabic distress and sudden bouts of confused violence would attract audiences of 15 million. The House Party manifesto was as simple as the era in which it was conceived: hysterical conviviality for all, unless you're Dave Lee Travis, in which case we'll break your legs.
Noël, Noël, Noël, Noël / Born is the King of Bra-aa-aaacknell. And Hove. And Ipswich, Canada, Finland and Crewe. The premise whispered of doom and seasonal biliousness but in reality the annual sight of Edmonds guffawing around the world to deliver festive reunions and white goods to the sickly and deserving was … not great, precisely, but also, crucially, not cack. The reason? Our host's unique ability to sidestep mawkishness while dressed as, variously, Santa, a Victorian dignitary and a garden gnome. He's called Noel for a reason, you know.
The concept? Simple. The Noel? Guarded; tightly bearded; visibly uncomfortable around pensioners. The subsequent, sweltering tension – will Doris from Thanet attempt to engage him in a conversation about her dead husband for longer than her allotted 30 seconds? – would turn a daytime gameshow about cardboard boxes into a potentially lethal game of chance.
Emboldened by the success of Deal or No Deal?, Edmonds' (brief) return to Saturday night TV found our subject very much in 'Noel's narked off' mode, sprinting through the obligatory 'members of the public rewarded for charitable deeds' bits in order to address the vexed issue of 'Broken Britain'. And lo, Noel didst upbraid bungling councils, bellow about bylaws and deliver sudden, snarling exhortations to know thy consumer rights lest the heavens split asunder and ye be cast into the eternal fire of implied warranty (Hotpoint 3:11-13). The subtext? I (Noel Edmonds) am angry, thus you (the viewer/Broken Britain/God) must pay. It was, in a very real sense, Brexit's patient zero.
'I am rocking,' intones Noel, emerging from his hyperbaric chamber like a blow-dried Christ. 'I. AM. ROCKING.' Broadcast this sort of stuff from a regional news studio and viewers would be lunging for the nearest mallet. But here, buttressed by a gasp-inducing mountain range and a preternaturally tolerant wife, Edmonds takes on an air of … vulnerability? Likability? Besides, the man's 76. If he wants to say 'I am Jesus' while wearing utility shorts in an outdoor shower, who are we to object? After six decades of televisual brilliance, awfulness, jumpers, Alan Partridge-esque hubris and comb-through hair colour, Noel Edmonds, perhaps more than anyone, has earned the right to be Noel Edmonds. Let us give thanks.
Noel Edmonds' Kiwi Adventure is on ITV1 at 9pm.