I remember Noel Edmonds as a nice man who poured technicolour gunge on celebrities and gave excited children Mega Drives (with Sonic 2 and everything). Until recently I had thought of him as a rather pitiful but ultimately harmless presenter of awful light entertainment programmes and peddler of creepy “cosmic ordering” books. (Cosmic ordering is some kind of new-age self-help thing whereby you, I don’t know, pray to bits of rock floating in space and consequently learn to forgive your ex-wife, or something. He also has been going on about his giant orbs that only appear in digital photographs quite a lot.) So imagine my surprise when I discovered that Noel is not just a sad, deluded man, but also a frothingly cross right-wing lunatic bastard from hell.
“Noel’s Bonkers Britain” is a slot on Noel’s recently-canceled Sky One “Noel’s HQ” show that usually consists of Noel smugly mocking “bonkers” things– bus drivers demanding grandmas provide proof of age for a concession ticket, that sort of thing– set to an appropriately bonkers looping soundtrack of military drums and farty tubas and bonkers mad things like that. Noel asks at the end of each segment: “What do you think of that?”, much to the delight of his audience, who are very much against bonkers stuff in general and miss the days when Britain was a sensible country where schoolboys had to wear knee-high socks until seven at night, and who therefore all cry in response: “Bonkers!” Then an awful man called Chris turns up and sings a song with a guitar about how Britain’s gone bonkers, and everyone quickly learns the words and joins in for the chorus, which goes, “Britain has gone bonkers / we’re treated like we’re plonkers / that’s why we sing this song / ’cause Britain has gone bonkers.”
However, there is no such joviality about this very special episode of Noel’s HQ, wherein Noel– and, inexplicably, Keith Chegwin– gets “angrier than he has ever been in a studio” about a man and a bungalow in Wealden. Cheggers definitely says ‘bongalow’ at 0:23, incidentally:
I’ve watched this video a few times and I’m still not sure I haven’t missed something. (Have I missed something? Leave a comment, Noel.) What Noel has never been angrier about– finger-pointingly, martyr-makingly, knife crime-referencingly furious, in fact– really does seem to be a just war veteran, Joe, who has been denied planning permission for a bungalow extension. If that’s truly the case, the implications of Noel’s position are frightening. If Wealden Council went about giving every war veteran planning permission for anything they wanted, they would have expanded beyond the Sussex borders years ago and covered most of Europe in bungalows. You would have to visit an Incan ruin to find a staircase, and even then I imagine Noel would be there with Chris singing a song demanding Machu Picchu be made wheelchair-access-friendly. (”They left their legs in Ypres / so Britain wouldn’t be blown up / now these stairs are far too steep / for them to reach the top.”)
I am mystified by Noel’s disdain for the council’s policy of “not talking to entertainment shows like yours”. This seems a perfectly reasonable position to me– Jade Goody’s death was undeserving of national coverage, let alone one man’s bungalow extension– and I am reassured to see a governmental body for once not bowing to the pressures of cheap celebrity.
Back in the glory days of Noel’s House Party, Noel would have had the budget to fly a gift bungalow in by helicopter as a surprise and drop it on top of whatever no-doubt crap patch of Outstanding Natural Beauty Wealden Council may be trying to protect. (He certainly could at least afford a Mega Drive, which I distinctly remember costing an impossible amount of money.) That would have really stuck it to those sneering bureaucrat bastards, who probably all have bungalow extensions themselves anyway. Instead the best he can offer Joe is a state-of-the-art carbon-fiber all-terrain wheelchair, a monstrous, warlike machine that will surely trigger flashbacks. Still, when it comes to showing authority figures what for, Noel and his team are wise not to underestimate the potent sting of a well-deployed rhyming couplet.
“The Government aren’t reading the instructions / Couldn’t find weapons of mass destruction / What’s the whole point of it all? / I guess we’ll never know really.”
And if you don’t watch out, he’ll cosmically reorder your house so your bed is in the LAV.
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