Your money used to fund Noel Edmonds you know – his gunge, his annoying sidekicks, his helicopter, his mansion and his funny little beard.
It doesn’t any more, though, and Noel Edmonds has got a right old cob on about it. Now that Noel’s made his ‘glorious comeback’ – which mainly involves ordering dimwits to open boxes on daytime Channel 4 and banging on about orbs of energy like some kind of swivel-eyed fairground huckster – he’s decided that everyone at the BBC is a great big idiot and so he doesn’t want to pay his licence fee any more.
So Noel Edmonds has stopped, because of what he describes as the BBC’s ‘threatening’ behaviour. It’s an impressive outburst, not least because the whole world – including Noel Edmonds – knows that Noel Edmonds would probably agree to host a show called Noel’s Donkey Masturbation And Anthrax Hour if it could be on BBC One again.
Noel Edmonds used to be Mr BBC. He had a radio show, he presented Top Gear, he had his own fluffy-jumpered quiz show about television and – best of all – he had Noel’s House Party. And, thanks to the unique way that the BBC is funded, you paid for that. When you saw Noel Edmonds play elaborately smug pranks on Eddie Large, or hop around like a giddy bearded elf pouring gallons of goo over Nigel Mansell, he was spending your money.
But now that Noel Edmonds is on commercial television and only indirectly funded by you, he’s had a bit of a rethink about the whole licence fee thing. Now Noel Edmonds thinks it’s all a load of bollocks and nobody should pay it, because the licence fee adverts are a bit depressing or something. Noel told BBC Breakfast:
“I worked for the BBC for 30 years. When I was there it promoted the licence fee by saying how wonderful it was. But now Auntie’s put boxing gloves on. I am not going to have the BBC or any other organisation threatening me. I’ve cancelled my TV licence and they haven’t found me. Nobody’s coming knocking on my door. There are too many organisations that seem to think it is OK to badger, hector and threaten people.”
This weird little outburst came right before Noel Edmonds’ new Sky One show, Noel’s HQ. If you missed it, it was kind of like that TV show Noel Edmonds used to present on Christmas Day, except with about 20 times extra Daily Mail-style public outrage. It was – what’s the word – odd.
But, to be fair, Noel Edmonds has got a point. The fun’s gone out of not paying your licence fee these days. Not so long ago you’d feel more like a renegade spy, living in the belief that a special van drove around the country with an impossibly advanced licence fee detection radar trying to catch people out. But now we all know that there’s just a database with everyone’s details on it, it’s hardly worth dodging your licence fee at all.
And because he’s admitted not paying his licence fee, Noel Edmonds has already got in trouble. There’s talk of him losing his ceremonial title of Deputy Lieutenant of Devon over it. Hopefully, though, the powers that be will see sense and, rather than just sack Noel Edmonds outright, they’ll simply demote him temporarily to Chief Petty Officer of Babbacombe (Scones And Yokel Division).
Ultimately, though, we have to side with Noel Edmonds on this argument. Like him, we’re sick of being threatened and bullied by television. It’d be so much better if all TV shows just fostered unintelligible, scientifically-berserk theories about positive energies having the ability to tangiably move physical objects to disguise the fact that they’re really just programmes about simple people arbitrarily opening some boxes, wouldn’t it.
Julian Mentat says
Good for you, Noel! And if you think it’s bad that “Auntie’s put boxing gloves on” (although, in truth, nobody at the BBC is ACTUALLY wearing boxing gloves, you’re just exaggerating like a 6-year-old), let us point out that police officers carry TRUNCHEONS which are so much worse than boxing gloves that surely you are now justified in breaking every law in the British legal system.