Five Questions About… Noel Edmonds Eating Worms

Three facts in quick succession:

1. Noel Edmonds is entering ITV’s I’m A Celebrity… Get Me Out Of Here! this week, taking a reported record £600,000 appearance fee to do so and vowing to retire forever if he is crowned King of the Jungle.
2. Noel Edmonds has joked that he has been “eating worms” in preparation for the show, telling the Mirror: “There are now no worms in our garden. What do worms taste like? Worms, exactly what you’d expect.”
3. I am possibly the world’s foremost reporter in the area of “potential consumption of worms by famous people”.

And so we take these three ingredients and take them to their natural conclusion, or:

FIVE QUESTIONS ABOUT NOEL EDMONDS ALLEGEDLY OR UN-ALLEGEDLY EATING WORMS

1. HOW OFTEN DO YOU SIT AND REALLY THINK ABOUT NOEL EDMONDS?

Noel Edmonds is a man who could only be famous in this country. I feel like Noel Edmonds is a TV personality who has been translated into German and back: you know when you go on holiday, and flick on the TV, and watch their personalities and their quiz show hosts gabble in a language unknown, saturated in foreign TV colours of yellows and red, and you think: ‘Why the fuck are these people clapping?’? You consider a semi-saucy Spanish weather girl and go: ‘These are their famous people? These?’ You see a bald host of Balearic Who Wants To Be A Millionaire and go: ‘Is this the most charming man in this country? Is this all they have?’

You think back to the UK, and our glossier celebrities: our primped Love Island contestants, our flawlessly airbrushed TOWIE personalities, Rita Ora. But then you don’t consider the shifting garbage layer of celebrity just beneath them: that girl with the big hair off The Wright Stuff, any of the auxiliary Loose Women, everyone who hands out oversized cheques on behalf of The Postcode Lottery. My greatest fear is a friend from another country will come to visit me and we’ll be there, idly watching TV together, and Noel Edmonds will come on, and they will turn and say: “Why has this man ascended to the height of television presenting in this country not once but, inexplicably, twice? Why is this eerie man famous?” and I will start sweating and say “err—” for so long I’ll actively stop them from missing their flight home.

Noel Edmonds is a sign of chaos in a universe where we expect order. There is simply no logic to the man being as famous as he is. He is the only evidence we have that we’re actually living in a parallel timeline to a real, normal one where Noel Edmonds is not famous. His existence as a famous and marvellously rich man makes no sense at all. ITV is paying him £600,000 to undergo light torture.

2. WAS NOEL EDMONDS JOKING ABOUT EATING WORMS?

Yes. Here is the exact extract from the Mirror interview with Edmonds, where the mad prick makes it very clear he is joking re: eating worms, he hath not eaten the worms at all:

Speaking to us shortly before he joins his fellow celebs in Croc Creek, Noel revealed: “I’ve done a certain amount of preparation for this.

I was in Thailand in February with my wife who has no problems with spiders and bugs. We were in this insect market in Cambodia and there was a kid with a tarantula and Liz said, ‘If you’re going to do that show, then you should hold the spider,’ so I held the spider but it did take a while to get to that point.

“So yes. I have been practising a few things but not eating the testicles.”

When we asked jokingly if he’d been eating disgusting things to prepare himself for the new diet, Noel quipped: “There are now no worms in our garden. What do worms taste like? Worms, exactly what you’d expect.”
— the Mirror, November ‘18

Yes. In answer to the question: he is absolutely joking about eating worms. The man has not eaten worms in preparation for this. But. But. But… but—

3. BUT—

But… there’s something quite vivid about the idea of Noel Edmonds eating worms, isn’t there? This is a man who has previously said on live TV that “bad vibes” cause cancer and repeatedly tried to buy the BBC out of spite. He drives a black cab with the doll of a woman in the front seat. He is not a normal person. So you can see him, can’t you, ferreting about in the garden of his splendid country home – the moonlight blue and white on the grass below him, head torch strapped above his spikey unmoving haircut (no other person on earth has Noel Edmonds’ haircut: further proof that he is our one true element of disorder), tablespoon in his hand, digging through the soil. A single light at the top of his mansion, a window flaps open. “Won’t be a minute, dear!” he shouts cheerily up. “Just eating a worm!” And then— in one, single chew, down. This is Noel Edmonds. He literally launched a Mr Blobby theme park in the 1990s and called it “Crinkly Bottom”. We were under a collective hysteria. There is nothing he would not do for this. The man would eat the worms.

4. HOW WOULD NOEL EDMONDS EAT WORMS IF HE DID EAT WORMS?

Noel Edmonds writing “worms” on the side of his hand and asking the universe for a bucket of worms, which he eats, greedily, the slick thin worm goo seeping into his beard. Or: Noel Edmonds, in the Deal or No Deal-themed parlour room I assume he has in his house instead of a dining table, pulling the tab on a succession of numbered boxes, each of them quietly writhing with worms, which he eats by the handful. Or: Noel Edmonds’ wife is desperately tugging at the sleeve of his fun-but-patterned shirt, tucked deeply into his jeans, begging, “No, Noel” and “please!” and Noel Edmonds dismisses her: “The only way—” he says, in that soothing daytime DJ voice of his, “that I’ll win this wretched show. Is by eating worms like I don’t even flinch about it.” Noel Edmonds going into the I’m A Celeb… jungle like Bear Grylls preparing to die beneath a wave. Noel Edmonds is fully prepared to drink his own piss. He’s never seen the show before. He doesn’t realise it’s mainly eating rice and showering. Noel Edmonds has taken more pocket knives into that jungle that a coach-load full of Year 8s returning back from France. Noel Edmonds eats the worms.

5. DISCUSS THE STATE OF FAME IN THE UK WHERE CELEBRITIES ARE ANNUALLY TASKED WITH EATING TESTICLES IN A BID TO MAKE THEMSELVES RELEVANT

Must be weird, being famous, mustn’t it. People sort of know you a bit and you get loads of Instagram followers, which you leverage into a free sofa, and then you’re sort of consumed by these large creaking grey gears of fame, and your fame-famous work dries up a bit, but to keep things going you have to hustle in this very grovelling way, and you’re getting papped leaving the This Morning studios because you’ve been invited on to discuss, I don’t know, “Should You Make Hot Chocolate Out Of Breast Milk” or something, and then the phone calls dry up, maybe you do a novelty single, maybe you try to represent a charity as a patron, and people still recognise you so you can’t ever really go back to your old job – imagine you, the formerly famous person, back behind the deli counter in Sainsbury’s! Grow up! – so you do sort of panel shows and radio appearances and maybe you do a two-year stint acting in Doctors, or something, playing a doctor, and again it’s kind of weird because everywhere you go people pull that face of recognition, like you see an unexpected friend in a crowd and – for a second, pulled by the sheer shock of seeing you – they recognise you but don’t recognise you, and people come up to you in the street – “Did we…?” they say, and you know to say now, “No,” you say, “We didn’t go to school together. I used to be on X Factor,” and they go oh yeah – and it’s been about two years since your agent called you and you’re not actually sure they are your agent anymore; are they actually your agent? You don’t know, and then the phone rings and they say, “Hey,” they say “Listen, I Know You Probably Need This,” and they explain the deal: you fly for 36 hours to Australia where you are to eat an animal’s cock while Dec from Ant and Dec cackles at you – and you’ll get an appearance fee and maybe start getting invited to PR parties again, so you say yes, of course, and you get there and you’re in your fleece waistcoat and you’re unshowered and you stink and you haven’t eaten properly for days and you keep getting set little tasks – Is this degrading, you think to yourself, am I a zoo animal being tortured for the amusement of others? – and then, just at your lowest ebb, just when you are staring into the campfire like it’s the abyss and wondering what you ever did with your life, Noel Edmonds turns up, cheery as ever, six hundred grand in his pocket, and says “Hi guys!” and “Let’s eat some worms!” It’s a shit business. You eat the worms with Noel Edmonds. You are not proud of what you have become.

@joelgolby