The ancient question, asked for millennia, the one our ancestors used to ask the gods at the top of great mountains: are athletes actually interesting when they are not throwing or catching a ball? There is a lot of evidence to suggest that the answer is “well: no. But does it really matter?” Look at the Sports Personality of the Year award. Look at basically any post-game interview in any sport. Read any athlete’s autobiography apart from Andre Agassi’s. As argued better than I’ll ever touch it by David Foster Wallace in How Tracy Austin Broke My Heart, elite athletes necessarily have to have quite an uninteresting personality so they can have unshakeable focus when the heat is on. Intrusive intellectual thoughts can scupper a match-point. That’s why Cole Palmer is so good at penalties.
Paddy “The Baddy” Pimblett, then, is one of sport’s outliers. As a man of a certain age – and I have spoken to many friends about this, and we have all fallen to the curse – I have found myself losing hours to the Liverpudlian MMA fighter’s hypnotic YouTube channel. BBC Three has tried to capture it with this week’s extraordinarily badly-named Paddy & Molly: Show No Mersey (a genuine offer to the BBC: I’ll come in when you announce the names of things, and bluntly tell you if they are bad, to avoid the embarrassment of Show No Mersey happening again. This one is bad).
If you’ve not seen his channel, I’ll summarise: in the week before a fight, we’ll see him do a few low-contact sessions at the gym, before flying to Las Vegas, getting in a series of hot baths, and trying to cut weight. Cutting weight is quite tedious but you watch it anyway. Then Paddy will go and get weighed, roar to a crowd of MMA fans (35-year-old men in backwards baseball caps), then drink a gallon of water. At some point, in a crowded lift, Paddy will fart and say “it’s proper bad, that, lad. Proper bad”. Then he’ll win the fight in a way we don’t see, come off stage, quick press conference, eat four burgers. We see him three days later again in Liverpool and he’s gained three stone, all on his face. I could watch a hundred of these in a row.
Which makes it all the more puzzling that Paddy & Molly (1 July, 9pm, BBC Three) – more or less the same format exactly, albeit with the addition of Pimblett’s best friend and fellow MMA fighter Molly “Meatball” McCann – is so much less entertaining. This is due to two fairly crucial alterations: firstly, a frenetic BBC Three-style edit, a real “MTV in 2012” throwback (within the first four minutes of the show I have heard snippets of about 10 songs, the screen keeps scratching like old film, and there are some joyless idents of Paddy and Molly punching listlessly at the camera). Secondly, there’s a bizarro attempt at the old-fashioned Made in Chelsea and Towie-style “you two go over there and have a chat on a balcony” thing which Paddy and Molly are not equipped for.
This isn’t to say the pair are unentertaining or uncharismatic – they are objectively not – but they keep getting forced into these strange scenes that don’t suit their energy or their personalities or their interpersonal dynamic, and it’s genuinely uncomfortable to see them limp their way through it. Put Paddy Pimblett in front of a camera and let him get a head of steam up and he’ll say one of the funniest things a modern sportsperson has ever uttered. Have him prone on a sofa with his manager asking “how you feeling?” nine times in a row and you won’t get the same magic.
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So it feels like a missed opportunity. There are many moments when Paddy and Molly approach saying something interesting about their sport: it’s interesting that two working-class friends made it to the big leagues of MMA, that they have both overcome injuries and defeat, how they analyse their wins and losses, every time they mention the dark pits of doom they fall into when a fight doesn’t go their way. But every time they get close to saying something like that, there’s a quick edit, another blast of a Wombats song, then we cut to a weirdly forced scene where Molly meets with two wordless men she’s starting a gin brand with. I don’t care about a gin brand! Tell me how it felt when your fight plan unravelled in seconds and you got kneed in the face! We climb back to the top of the mountain. Not this time.
