In my opinion Paddy ruined QOS and Top Gear.
The latter also gone but for different reasons.
No idea what the thinking was in giving him these roles.
This was the year that Paddy McGuinness could have been the primetime GOAT – but somehow became the prime-time goat. Twelve months ago he was the host of Question of Sport, Top Gear, Catchpoint and I Can See Your Voice. He was all over Friday night, Saturday night and Sunday night – the BBC’s Mr Weekend.
In February, Catchpoint and I Can See Your Voice were taken off air. In November Top Gear was shelved indefinitely after Freddie Flintoff’s 2022 crash. Last week, the BBC axed Question of Sport after 50 years. Next year, McGuinness is going back to stand-up. Explaining why he’s touring to Emma Willis and Rylan Clark on This Morning he said, simply, “the money’s run out.”
It can’t have been easy to take these dominoes crashing down. In July 2022 his 11-year marriage ended; McGuinness and his wife Christine are still living together and raising their three children. A year before the split they both presented the documentary Our Family and Autism, explaining how they had struggled when they discovered all three kids had been diagnosed with the condition. Understandably, he spoke in March about his depression and how therapy was helping.
It’s a harsh and slightly unfair turn of events for the presenter, who arrived at the BBC in 2018 after eight years at the helm of ITV’s dating show Take Me Out, the 21st century successor to Blind Date. This wasn’t the sexless banality of Cilla’s finest hour – it was more like standing in a nightclub at 2am watching a bloke try to impress a hen do.
The format was simple. A single man tried to persuade one of 30 women to be his date in a series of rounds, where he displayed, for instance, his skills at dancing or had friends pitch him as a catch. The women stood on a stage underneath thirty white lights, each with a button in front of them. At any point, they could turn their light off, meaning they weren’t interested. McGuinness coined a catchphrase for this opt out – “no lighty, no likey”.
Whilst critics sniffed at the show when it launched in 2010, it became cult viewing, especially in the hard-to-reach younger audience – offering a gentle alternative to Love Island. Eight couples who met on the show subsequently got married and six babies were born to contestants.
“On Take Me Out, he was perfect for the show,” one twentysomething devotee tells me. “So many presenters would have played it wrong – slightly lecherous or over the top. Paddy was funny and cheeky, but he was safe. You trusted him. Stupid things like ‘no likey, no lighty’… it’s hard to explain, but it’s like he’s on the women’s side. Me and my friends – my female friends – watched it all together at university. I don’t know any boys that did. He was the brother you wished you had. When he went to Top Gear, I didn’t follow. It’s not my show.”
McGuinness arrived at Take Me Out after playing Peter Kay’s sidekick in Phoenix Nights and Max and Paddy’s Road to Nowhere. The two met at nursery school in Bolton, and Paddy chose to be a stand-up after watching Kay in a local club. The two remain friends, although Kay recently called McGuinness a “pain in the a___” for always being late to filming.
McGuinness couldn’t match Kay as a stand-up when they were both on the circuit, says Steve Bennett, who owns comedy website Chortle. “He’s not really a stand-up,” he explains. “He does slightly try to tap into that Peter Kay ‘do you remember Wotsits’ vibe but with less success. Take Me Out was a good show for him – he’s a Chris Evans-lite, blokeish but not offensive.”
So where did it all go wrong? For a start, the BBC moved him from Saturday night’s eternal boyfriend and surrounded him with petrolheads and rugby players. His audience didn’t come with him, so he was facing a new and hostile audience.
Top Gear insiders say McGuinness was taking time to find his feet but could have made the show his own with a couple more seasons. “It’s a beast of a show to film, so it takes a lot of practice to work out how to outperform the cars and the stunts,” says one former producer. “Paddy had the ghost of Clarkson hovering over him, and whilst Jeremy had two co-presenters, Paddy had Flintoff the cricketer and Chris Harris the racing driver. They weren’t light entertainment presenters and Top Gear has more in common with the Generation Game than a proper car show. So Paddy had to carry them as well. It was tough. But look, the ratings weren’t bad. He beat Clarkson at times. He could have been really good if the awful crash hadn’t ended everything.”
As for A Question of Sport, there are many who think McGuinness was let down by the BBC. In an act of magnificent stupidity, the corporation rudely sacked Sue Barker, who did not go quietly into that good night. They also revamped the entire show meaning that taking the presenters chair was always going to be more risky than sitting on the Iron Throne.
McGuinness lost the bantering of team captains Phil Tufnell and Matt Dawson and had to coax some sort of funny out of former GB hockey player Sam Quek and rugby union’s Ugo Monye. Perhaps he could have done something given time, but having destroyed the show, the BBC saw the inevitable ratings slump – down from four million in 2021 to around 800,000 – panicked and cancelled it after two McGuinness seasons.
“It’s very difficult to work out whether it’s the format, presenter or both when a new format doesn’t work – TV isn’t as close and confessional as radio, so there isn’t a TV equivalent to Ken Bruce,” says Tom Harrington, analyst at Enders Analysis. “But with Question of Sport there was clearly an audience response to the retooling, including the insulting name change, as the viewing drop over the past two seasons was quite precipitous, even for 2023. It’s not that Paddy McGuinness is a bad presenter, it’s just that he and the other changes chafed too much with the audience’s long-bedded expectations the show. The reasons for the BBC wanting to do this are obvious, but the futility of the attempt was completely predictable.”
Harrington believes 2023 was the year broadcasters completely misunderstood what made shows great in the past and what made overseas formats great when they imported them. “Channel 4 turned Alone from a brutal US competition pitting survival skills against the uncompromising wilderness, to what appeared to be a random cast of characters that would struggle to put up a tent,” he sighs. “It was hyped and flopped. Survivor on the BBC erased all the melodrama and intrigue of the ageless US version replacing it with light humour. It flopped – which is weird, when the things it was missing were already there in abundance in The Traitors. That was a massive hit, so obviously the UK likes that type of programme.”
The BBC is still working with McGuinness – he’s been announced as the new presenter of BBC Two’s Inside the Factory. In the press release, he does his best to sound cheerful about the role: “One of my first jobs was in a factory so I’ve come full circle. I’m fascinated by the machinery and the people who make it all tick. Hair nets aside, I can’t wait to get cracking!”
Bennett thinks it’s a waste. “Good light entertainment presenters are surprisingly hard to find,” he explains. “Paddy used to be a Butlins redcoat. That’s really what he is, an MC and entertainer who channels a bit of laddishness. He could be a great shiny floor presenter. One day someone will realise that and give him the show he deserves.”
