Paddy McGuinness in Top Gear Photo: Lee Brimble
This was the year Paddy McGuinness could have been primetime's GOAT – but somehow became the goat of prime time. Twelve months ago he was the host of A Question in Sports, Top Gear, Catchpoint and I Can See Your Voice. He was everywhere on Friday night, Saturday night and Sunday night – the BBC's Mr Weekend.
Catchpoint and I Can See Your Voice were taken off air in February. In November, Top Gear was postponed indefinitely following the Freddie Flintoff crash in 2022. Last week the BBC dropped the sport after 50 years. McGuinness will return to stand-up next year. Explaining why he was touring with Emma Willis and Rylan Clark on This Morning, he simply said: “The money's gone.”
It wasn't easy to let that domino fall. His 11-year marriage ended in July 2022; McGuinness and his wife Christina still live together and have three children. A year before their split, they both presented a documentary, Our Family and Autism, in which they described their struggles when they discovered that all three of their children had been diagnosed with the condition. It is understood that in March he opened up about his depression and how therapy was helping him.
It's an abrupt and slightly unfair turn of events for the presenter, who joined the BBC in 2018 after eight years at the helm of ITV 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 guy try to impress a hen party.
The format was simple. A single man tried to persuade one of 30 women to go on a date with him in a series of rounds where he showed off his dancing skills, for example, or asked friends to suggest him as a catch. The women stood on a stage under thirty white lights, each with a button in front of it. They could turn off the lights at any moment, which means they weren't interested. McGuinness came up with a catchphrase for this refusal – “no light, no like.”
Hosted by Paddy McGuinness Take Me Out in 2013 Photo: Stephen Peskett
Despite the series being snubbed by critics when it launched in 2010, it became a cult watch, especially among hard-to-reach younger audiences, offering a soft-spoken alternative to Love Island. Eight couples who met on the show subsequently got married, and the contestants had six children.
“Take Me Out made him perfect for the show,” one twenty-something fan tells me. “A lot of presenters would play it wrong—slightly slutty or over the top. Paddy was funny and cheeky, but he was safe. You trusted him. Stupid things like “no likes, no shares”… it’s hard to explain, but it’s like he’s on the side of women. Me and my friends – my girlfriends – watched all this together at the university. I don't know any boy who would do this. He was the brother you wanted to have. When he came to Top Gear I didn't follow him. It's not my show.”
McGuinness came to Take Me Out after playing Peter Kay's assistant in Phoenix Nights and Max and Paddy's Road to Nowhere. They met at a nursery school in Bolton and Paddy decided to become a stand-up after watching Kay at a local club. They remain friends, although Kay recently called McGuinness a “pain in the ass” for always being late to filming.
“All I remember is a lot of laughter,” Kay writes in her new book, Television: Big Adventures on the Small Screen. “Especially from me and Paddy. It was then that he managed to appear on the set. He was annoyed that he was late in the morning.”
McGuinness couldn't match Kay's stand-up routine when they were both on stage, says Steve Bennett, owner of comedy website Chortle. “He’s not really a stand-up,” he explains. “It does try to tap into Peter Kay's 'do you remember Watsits' vibe, but with less success. Take Me Out was a good show for him – very Chris Evans-esque, manly but not offensive.”
So where did it all go wrong? To begin with, the BBC removed him from his eternal Saturday night boyfriend and surrounded him with car enthusiasts and rugby players. His audience did not go with him, so he faced a new and hostile audience.
Top Gear insiders say McGuinness needs time to find his feet, but he could make the show his own with a couple more seasons. “This show is a monster to film, so it takes a lot of practice to figure out how to top the cars and the stunts,” says one former producer. “The ghost of Clarkson hung over Paddy, and although Jeremy had two co-hosts, Paddy had cricketer Flintoff and racing driver Chris Harris. They weren't light entertainment hosts, and Top Gear has more in common with The Generation Game than with an actual car show. So Paddy had to carry them too. This was hard. But look, the ratings weren't bad. Sometimes he beat Clarkson. He could have been really good if a terrible accident hadn't put an end to everything.”
Top Gear presenters Chris Harris, Paddy McGuinness and Freddie Flintoff Photo: Pennsylvania
On A Question of Sport, many feel McGuinness was let down by the BBC. In an incredibly stupid move, the corporation rudely fired Sue Barker, who did not go quietly to that good night. They also revamped the entire show, meaning that sitting in the hosting chair was always going to be riskier than sitting on the Iron Throne.
McGuinness lost out on the banter of team captains Phil Tufnell and Matt Dawson and had to extract some humor from former Great Britain hockey player Sam Quek and rugby union man Hugo Monier. Perhaps he could have done something with time, but having ruined the show, the BBC saw an inevitable decline in ratings – from four million in 2021 to around 800,000 – panicked and canceled the show after two seasons of McGuinness.
“It's very difficult to determine whether it's format-specific, host-specific, or both when a new format doesn't work—TV isn't as intimate and confessional as radio, so there's no TV equivalent of Ken Bruce,” says Tom Harrington, an analyst at Enders. Analysis. “But in the case of A Question of Sports, audiences clearly responded to the retooling, including the offensive name change, as the drop in viewing figures over the last two seasons was quite steep, even for 2023. It's not that Paddy McGuinness is a bad presenter, it's just that he and the other changes were too much of an irritant to viewers' long-standing expectations of the show. The reasons why the BBC wanted to do this are obvious, but the futility of the attempt was entirely predictable.”
Paddy McGuinness will host the question about sports in 2021. Photo: BBC
Harrington believes 2023 was the year that broadcasters completely misunderstood what made shows great in the past and what made foreign formats so great when they imported them. “Channel 4 has gone from being a brutal US competition pitting survival skills against uncompromising wilderness into something like a random assortment of characters who find it difficult to pitch a tent,” he sighs. “It was hyped and failed. The BBC's The Revenant erased all the melodrama and intrigue of the timeless American version, replacing it with light humor. He failed – and this is strange, because what he lacked was already in abundance in Traitors. It was a huge success, so obviously the UK loves this type of programme.”
The BBC is still working with McGuinness – he has been announced as the new presenter of BBC Two's Inside the Factory. In the press release, he goes out of his way to make his role look debonair: “One of my first jobs was in a factory, so I've come full circle. I'm fascinated by the equipment and the people who make it all happen. If you throw away the hair nets, I can’t wait for them to crack!”
Bennett thinks it's a waste of time. “It’s surprisingly difficult to find good entertainment presenters,” he explains. “Paddy used to be a Butlins redcoat. That's who he really is: a host and entertainer who gets a little naughty. He could be a great brilliant speaker. One day someone will understand this and give him the show he deserves.”
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