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

As the presenter makes a comeback with a wild attempt to run a New Zealand pub, we look back on his greatest moments – from gunge-based hysteria to being Brexit’s patient zeroHe 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. Continue reading...