In the 80s and 90s a small coterie of TV presenters and game-show hosts strode over British culture like colossi. You may not have liked them, you may have actively hated them, but you could never escape them. Their faces were everywhere: on your TV screen; splashed across the red tops; staring out at you from billboards and bus-shelters. Their names were on everyone’s lips: from the living room to the water-cooler, and everywhere in between.
It’s difficult to imagine such heights of absolute celebrity in today’s fragmented pop-culture landscape. Thanks to the internet, and gaming consoles, and YouTube, and countless streaming platforms, media consumption has become as much a curated expression of individuality as fashion. As a consequence, very few figures in the light entertainment industry today possess the power or influence to unite us in shared language and experience. Simply put: the jig’s up.
I decided to wade into the nostalgic depths of our shared past and track down those once mighty, now forgotten titans of the TV world. To chronicle a lost era. To find out how its stars adjusted to civvy street and oblivion-flavoured retirement in the wake of their celebrity being usurped by the likes of Blippi, Big Brother, and some bloke who goes on YouTube for six hours every night to list all the women he’d like to pump.
Where are they now?
Locating and interviewing every light-entertainment celebrity of the Thatcher years was always going to be outside the scope of this article. There are simply too many of them. Some weren’t available or evaded my efforts to reach them. Some I just couldn’t be arsed speaking to.
Michael Barrymore declined my request for interview, telling me he preferred to be left to live out his days in relative obscurity. He currently lives in Bethnal Green, working as a lifeguard at the local swimming pool. When I reached out to Paul Daniels, he trotted out the lame excuse that ‘he was dead’. And Jimmy Savile, everyone’s favourite eccentric uncle, appears simply to have fallen off the face of the earth. I guess we’ll never know what became of that loveable rogue.
I began by going after the big guns, and there was no bigger gun back then than Noel Edmonds. I’m not talking about his penis, per se, but it’s indisputable that he had a massive chopper, which can be seen, even to this day, hurtling through the skies above Kent, dangling over the edge of his helicopter.
Edmonds’ career began in the 1970s with a show on London Weekend Television called Look at my Fucking Jumper!. Each week Edmonds would wear a different jumper and invite his studio audience and panel of guests to ‘fucking look at it’. From there he went on to dominate the schedules, with show after show filled with pure, uncut, light-entertainment heroin, which the great British public was only too keen to shoot directly into its veins. There was Multi-Coloured Swap Shop, which saw Edmonds trading slaves live on air; TV Addicts, where contestants battled to have sex with men in dresses; and, of course, Noel’s House Party, where Edmonds shared the stage with a fat, pink blob with a fixed manic grin who repeated the same phrase over and over to the audience in an irritating high-pitched squeal. Keith Chegwin sadly died in 2017.
Edmonds’ career wasn’t without scandal. In 1987 a deeply regrettable incident on his prime-time Saturday evening BBC show What a Bunch of Daft Cunts You All Are, Seriously, I Can Barely Stand to Look at You threatened to knock him off the top spot. Rehearsals for a stunt segment, featuring an ordinary member of the public, resulted in the death of that contestant. Barry Barryton, a chartered surveyor from Leeds, had been rigged up for a bungee jump from a bridge, but health and safety protocols weren’t followed, and seconds later Edmonds accidentally launched an RPG at him from his helicopter.
During his time presenting Deal or No Deal Edmonds courted controversy again when he claimed that he could cure cancer simply by growling at it and ‘calling it a cunt’. It was for this reason, among many others, that Edmonds was eventually banned from Great Ormond Street Hospital.
But the biggest uproar came when it was revealed that Mr Blobby was actually a kidnapped Venezuelan sailor, Caesar Consuela, that Edmonds had pumped full of hallucinogens and sealed inside a giant rubber suit, with his mouth connected to an artificial voice box that translated his anguished screams for help into ‘BLOBBY BLOBBY BLOBBY!’ The furore only died down when Caesar agreed to marry Edmonds in a lavish ceremony at Kensington Palace. Unfortunately, he later tragically died when he fell from Edmonds’ chopper, breaking his neck on the bedroom floor.
I arranged to meet Edmonds inside a white, formless void that he called The Eternal Ether of the Hinterlands of Nothingness. It’s in Basingstoke, not far from the train station. Edmunds had his hair brushed back into his trademark lion’s mane and was wearing ceremonial robes that flowed to his feet.
“NO-EL!” he shouted as I stepped towards him, the shock of which rooted me to the spot. “But what if there really was no ‘L’? What then? WHAT WOULD IT BE THEN?”
“Em… Noe?” I shrugged.
He nodded sagely. “And THAT’S why I don’t celebrate Christmas.”
We stared at each other for a moment, the silence stretching between us until it became uncomfortably loud. Mercifully, both silence and tension were broken by the sudden ringing of a phone. Edmonds reached inside his robes and retrieved the handset.
“Ah, Mr Banker. We’ve been expecting your call. Mmmm mmmm. Oh, interesting. Oh that’s hardly fair.”
He lowered the handset from his mouth, arched an eyebrow and whispered conspiratorially to me: “He’s not saying very nice things about you.” Then he continued talking. “Mmm mmm. Yes, I’ll pass it on.”
He replaced the handset inside his robes and regarded me with a look halfway between smug and pitying.
“He says you played a good game to begin with, but things have started to fall apart. So he’s prepared to offer you… £1000.”
I regarded him with a look of my own: resolutely, incontrovertibly pitying. “I couldn’t help but notice that when the phone rang the noise came from your mouth, Noel. And the phone itself: that was your own hand, wasn’t it?”
He stretched his arms out like Jesus on the cross. “YOU FOOL! I HAVE TRANSCENDED OBJECTS! DO YOU DOUBT IT?”
“Em… yes,” I told him.
He chuckled. “So I suppose you doubt that I can cure cancer by dressing up as Scooby Doo and farting in a nun’s mouth?”
I nodded.
“And I suppose you also doubt that ‘Deal or No Deal’ was actually a cover for my real mission to use red boxes to manipulate events in the multiverse?”
“I’m afraid so.”
“Even when I used the movement of boxes in the game where Tariq Ali from Bradford cashed in his 50p box for £75,000 as a cover for creating an entirely new universe where Spit the Dog was man-sized and fully sentient and had a charming hand-puppet called Bob Carolgees the Human?”
“Yes.”
He was laughing very hard by this point. “And I suppose you think that rather than a formless void this white room is actually a secure cell inside a mental institution and my nurse is about to walk through that door at any second and tell me it’s time for my medication?”
“Medication time, Mr Edmonds.”
“Fuck.”
As the nurse dragged him flailing and screaming from the room, the once-great entertainer filled the retreating space with the full force of his madness, roaring out fevered confessions and surreal gibberish. “Tell them I killed Hull! There was somebody at the door that day, alright. By fuck it was me! I was the one who knocked! Knocked him right off the bastard roof! Tell them Emu was innocent! EMU WAS INNOCENT! [Emu is currently serving an indefinite stretch at Broadmoor for Rod Hull’s murder]”
But one thing he did yell piqued my interest, especially when it turned out to be true. “Somehow…” he slurred, as the drugs began to kick in, “…Beadle has returned.”
I had a lot of time to think on my space-flight to Exegol, the planet on which Beadle was rumoured to be amassing a secret fleet of TV crews. I pondered the trail of breadcrumbs that had led me out into the cosmos. Immediately after Edmonds had succumbed to his medication, I booked a visit with Emu in Broadmoor. It was a sorry bird indeed who popped up behind the Plexiglass. One eye missing, bedraggled fur, the unmistakable mottle of herpes over his lips. He looked jaded and defeated. Broken. The governor told me that Emu had been targeted by prison gangs and brutalised in ways that went far beyond simple beatings. Constant violation and degradation. No-one on the outside seemed to care. All had turned their backs on him after Rod’s murder. Only Grotbags still visited.
“How are you, Emu?” I asked. He could tell by the notes of pity and concern in my voice that the governor had talked to me.
“What the gangs do to me, you mean? I’ve had a hand up my arse for sixty years. You think the fuckin’ showers bother me, son?”
It brought a whole new meaning to the phrase ‘doing bird’. I changed the subject, but, unfortunately, to one that was just as uncomfortable for Emu.
“I talked to Noel,” I said.
Emu lunged at the Plexi-glass and tried to bite me through it.
“He confessed to the murder,” I added, in a bid to console him.
Emu lurched to a halt. His head disappeared under the screen for a second, but only because the guy operating him had to scratch his itchy arse and balls.
“No wonder I’ve got fucking herpes,” said Emu, as he re-emerged. “Did that prick Edmonds say anything else?”
“Yes, something cryptic about Beadle somehow returning.”
“Yeah, you mug, that’s who put Edmonds up to it. Pulling the strings from beyond the grave. Except he ain’t dead. He’s in Exegol, in the Unknown Regions. Trying to get a new series of ‘Beadles About’ on the go. Bit risky, you ask me.”
“Bringing back ‘Beadles About’?”
“No, using a Star Wars reference in this article, especially as Exegol and the fleet and all that is in the ‘Rise of Skywalker’, the one that absolutely everyone hated, and probably no-one’s seen.”
“Yeah, I did worry about that Emu, and the fact that I’ve now got to completely break with reality and go on a journey through space. Stretching it a bit, isn’t it?”
“That’s quite an inconsiderate way to phrase it given what’s going to happen to me in the showers again tonight.”
“Sorry, Emu, I didn’t mean to rub your face in it.”
“YOU FUCKING DID IT AGAIN!”
“TIME’S UP!” shouted a prison guard from the corner of the room.
“Well, safe journey to Exegol, Jamie,” said Emu, visibly resigned to his fate. “Clear my name, will you? Anyway, I’m off to the shower block to see a group of men about a frightening number of Pink Windmills.”
As Exegol loomed large in the viewscreen I had time to reflect on one of the luminaries of light entertainment I hadn’t been able to find. Cilla Black began life as Priscilla White, before being resurrected as Cilla Black following a fatal altercation with a Balrog on an episode of Surprise, Surprise. She didn’t die in 2015 as was widely reported, or at least her condition wasn’t as terminal as the wider public was led to believe. Yes, she died, following a vicious knife fight with the ghost of Bob Monkhouse, but she was resurrected again as Cill the Grey, whereabouts unknown. Rumours abound that she’s ever ready to leap into action to protect the ring. So it wouldn’t surprise surprise me to learn that she’s Emu’s new lawyer. Her shows may be gone, but her spirit lives on in the US versions of her formats, most notably Surprise, Surprise, Motherfucker, presented by the guy who played Sgt Doakes on Dexter, where serial killers are tearfully reunited with the victims who got away, and Blind, Deaf and Dumb Date, where a trio of contestants perch on stools for forty-five minutes in confusion and silence. It’s still better than Mrs Brown’s Boys.
I disembark from the craft on the dark, misty, sinister surface of Exegol. Within minutes a bearded man dressed as a traffic warden is telling the pilot that the spacecraft has violated parking law and has to be seized and crushed. We’re worried for a while – how will we get home? – but the traffic warden soon takes off his hat and glasses to reveal that he’s actually Jeremy Beadle in the process of pranking us. He smiles his giddy, toothy grin as he puts his arm around the pilot, and points at a set of cameras that clearly aren’t there. The pilot bursts out laughing and calls him a ****ing **** ******* ***** *****.
“Mr Beadle,” I say, as I approach him. “You’re alive after all.”
“One of my minions,” a crooked voice croaks from the shrouded darkness. “One of… many minions. Clones, Mr Andrew. Enough of them to spread my practical joke mayhem to every corner of the universe. Oh, Beadle, I’m afraid, is most definitely About.”
And out he steps, Beadle mixed with Emperor Palpatine, a transformation he’s undergone purely to maintain a comedic throughline for the whole Star Wars angle I’ve foolishly chosen, as this article goes ever further off the rails. He tries to zap me with Force Lightning but forgets to factor in his withered little hand, and accidentally cracks himself in the balls with it. Canned laughter accompanies his pain. When he recovers he hollers ‘BEHOLD’ and a multitude of giant TV screens, the sort you’d find in stadiums during rock concerts, emerge from slits in the rocky wasteland behind him. All at once images flicker to life on each of the screens. Horrifying images. Gut-churning images. Disasters, terrorist attacks, massacres, episodes of Mrs Browns’ Boys.
“Ukraine, 9/11, Sudan, Israel and Palestine, every earthquake and tsunami of the last four decades, ALL OF IT orchestrated by ME for a new series of You’ve Been Framed. It’s been expensive as fuck, too. I’ve had to send £250 quid each time. I’m basically funding Hamas at this point.”
Suspicious, I marched up to Beadle and pulled at his face, which came away in my hands, all rubbery and floppy. A mask! The face I was now looking at belonged to Noel Edmunds. He began laughing manically, before launching in to his usual tirade:
“I guess you’re just crazy enough to doubt that any of this is real, and probably think that we’re still in the mental institution and all of this has been in my head and none of it actually happened?!”
“Medication time, Mr Edmonds!”
“Fuck.”
Read Jamie’s interview with the maligned stars of the breakfast cereal boxes HERE
Read Jamie’s interview with Elmer Fudd at Looney Tunes HQ HERE
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Half the joy of raising children is in reconnecting with your own childhood. Not for its own sake – which would be regressive, selfish and honestly a bit weird; a few steps removed from strapping on a nappy and supping from a giant milk-bottle as a prostitute becalms you – but in order to sieve out the things that gave you the most joy; your best and happiest memories, so you can pass them down the generational chain: places you went, games you played, movies you watched, books you read.
