The Daily Mail postbag says it all: ‘I like Bradley Walsh but he is never off the TV screen — and now we have his son, Barney,’ writes Graham Deacon of Liverpool. ‘Bradley, please give us a break!’
‘Are there any other TV presenters available apart from Bradley Walsh?’ asks Laurence Knott, of East Barnet in Hertfordshire.
‘When will Bradley Walsh be recruited to read the news?’ inquires Gary Guymer of Lowestoft. ‘It’s about the only thing he hasn’t done on TV.’
Many more readers are making the same point and they’re not alone.
He’s everywhere, on everything: actor, comedian, singer, quiz host, special guest and not least the doting dad of Barney, an aspiring all-rounder himself.
Bradley Walsh and Holly Willoughby hosting game show Take Off with Bradley & Holly
Bradley and Barney… as a heckler at the Glasgow Empire famously shouted when confronted with both Mike and Bernie Winters: ‘Oh Jesus, there’s two of them!’
Even schedulers at the BBC have realised that we have reached Peak Walsh. Earlier this month, they were forced to take action when the relaunch of Gladiators (presented by Bradley, 63, and Barney, 26) was followed by the return of Michael McIntyre’s Big Show — featuring special guest, er, Bradley Walsh.
As yet another Mail correspondent, Margaret Nunn of Plymouth, pointed out, this wasn’t the half of it. That day — Saturday, January 13 — Bradley was scheduled to appear in no fewer than ten different shows, including The Chase Celebrity Special and Breaking Dad (a travel series with son Barney), both on ITV.
On top of that, Barney was appearing on BBC1 hospital drama Casualty, where he’s a regular as diffident staff nurse Cam Mickelthwaite. Realising something had to be done, the Beeb substituted at the last minute a different Michael McIntyre episode, guaranteed to be Walsh-free.
But the respite didn’t last long. Just a week later, on January 20, up popped Bradley on the Big Show on BBC1, the victim of a prank where he was woken at 1am for a lunatic version of This Is Your Life.
‘He’s on almost every show,’ admitted McIntyre, as he tiptoed to Bradley’s hotel room in Sheffield. ‘He’s on the other channel, probably right now.’ And who had set him up for the prank? Barney, of course.
Harsh but true, Barney’s weaknesses as a presenter are magnified by constantly appearing in a double act with his dad. He’s literally in the older man’s shadow.
During the opening episode of Gladiators, his hesitant timing was all too obvious during banter with his father — and there are moments on Breaking Dad, especially when Barney is striving to impress, when the standard is no better than a family home video.
We’re left with the inevitable impression that Barney wouldn’t get a sniff at prime-time TV if he wasn’t riding on his father’s coat-tails. He’d do far better to follow his own path, however long the route to success, instead of looking for shortcuts.
He’s not alone among nepo-babies looking for a leg-up, of course. Miquita Oliver is rarely seen onscreen without support from chef mum Andi; DJ Roman Kemp seems heavily reliant on pop star parents Martin and Shirlie; and we won’t even mention Brooklyn Beckham.
But even the most brutal critic has to admit that Walsh Snr is exceptionally good at what he does.
In front of a baying crowd at the Gladiators arena, he’s effortlessly in control, building up the excitement to a manic pitch.
Bradley Walsh (pictured left with Holly Willoughby) and Dan Baldwin (right) — whose production company Hungry Bear makes Breaking Dad — are ‘pretty much inseparable,’ says an industry source
Bradley demonstrated the same unshakeable confidence as he presented the Royal Variety Performance at the Albert Hall last year, treating the Prince and Princess of Wales with the same good-humoured mockery he uses to tease contestants on his game show The Chase.
Despite the age-old protocol that entertainers should not directly address the royal box, he opened the show by welcoming their ‘royal highnesses’ — and joking: ‘It doesn’t sound right, your royal highnessesses? There’s too many ‘ssessesses’, innit?
‘It should be like cactus, cactuses, cacti. Your royal highness, highnesses and highni. That’s it. I’ve got it. Your royal highni.’
Then he launched into a routine about how he doesn’t have so much as an MBE, when other television personalities get damehoods ‘for baking cakes’.
That’s the essence of what Bradley Walsh does. He can never be offensive, because there’s always that cheeky twinkle, the nudge in the ribs that says this is just a bit of fun.
The recent relaunch of the Gladiators reality show is helmed by Bradley Walsh and his son Barney, leading to accusations of nepotism
Bradley Walsh has hosted the BBC’s Blankety Blank 33 times
His victims forgive him everything. In one episode of The Chase, 13 years ago, Bradley went to pieces as he read out a question about the German Olympic skier Fanny Chmelar. He pronounced it ‘smeller’ before he curled up in a ball, weeping helplessly. The clip went viral.
You might think poor Fanny would never forgive him — but there she was on McIntyre’s Big Show, ushered into Bradley’s hotel room while he cowered under the sheets in nothing but a pair of boxer shorts.
Her surname, she informed him, is actually pronounced ‘schmeeler’, and she broke into a grin as he yelped with laughter again.
Injury forced Bradley to abandon his hopes of being a professional footballer at Brentford FC in the early 1980s
It’s this gift for provoking laughter without putting people’s backs up that makes Bradley an invaluable TV performer. Television is beamed right into the heart of our homes. It tries to be all things to all people, and that is deceptively difficult. There’s no substitute for a family-friendly presenter.
Key to any channel’s success in signing ‘Bradders’ — as he’s known in the industry — is getting on the good side of Dan Baldwin, a television production guru and close friend of the presenter. Walsh and Baldwin — whose production company Hungry Bear makes Breaking Dad — are ‘pretty much inseparable,’ says an industry source.
Baldwin also happens to be ITV star Holly Willoughby’s husband, with the three of them seen together at the Variety Club awards in London last year.
For some time, Baldwin’s dream has been to pair family-friendly Walsh with his own wife. He almost managed it in December 2019 with the screening of a pilot episode of Take Off With Bradley And Holly, which the BBC hoped would be the next Generation Game — only for Covid regulations to make a commissioned series impossible.
Phillip Schofield — now off our screens after revelations he had conducted a long-standing affair with a colleague 34 years his junior — may have breathed a sigh of relief at its demise, for it was said he wasn’t entirely sold on Ms Willoughby having a new screen partner.
Walsh, it has to be said, has benefited from a shrinking pool of family favourites. Half a century ago, there were scores of them. Bruce Forsyth, Tommy Trinder, Arthur Askey and Bob Monkhouse were among the biggest names, but producers had an array of others to pick from — Nicholas Parsons, Ted Rogers, Jimmy Tarbuck, Leslie Crowther and more.
Every Saturday night saw all-star shows hosted by comedians with a gift for making grannies and schoolchildren roar with laughter at the same jokes.
We still love the likes of Morecambe And Wise and The Two Ronnies today. All those talented artistes shared one thing in common, something that also applies to Bradley — they came up the hard way.
The music halls were long gone by the time injury forced Bradley to abandon his hopes of being a professional footballer at Brentford FC in the early 1980s. At 21, working as an apprentice at Rolls-Royce, he entered a talent contest on holiday in Majorca — doing Norman Wisdom impressions.
A talent spotter approached him afterwards and advised him to audition as a Pontins ‘blue coat’ or campsite entertainer. That job led to gigs in working men’s clubs as a singer and stand-up, then to end-of-the-pier shows.
He spent a decade polishing his timing and learning to work an audience. By the time he made his first appearances on TV, on variety shows hosted by Cannon And Ball, and Des O’Connor, he was nearly 30. That kind of experience can’t be bought or taught. There’s no easy alternative. The audience laughs or they don’t — but they never lie.
‘I didn’t really start learning till I went to Blackpool, the Horseshoe Showbar on the Pleasure Beach,’ he recalled on Desert Island Discs in 2022. ‘That was a 20-week season. So by the end of the first month, you’ve got rid of all the rubbish material you don’t need and all of a sudden, you’re awake.’
He was helped by an unstoppable work ethic, inherited from his mother Margaret — an auxiliary nurse at a psychiatric hospital who worked a second job in a canteen, bringing in extra cash after his father walked out.
‘I adopted the same thing when I was young,’ he said, ‘ending up with about four jobs at one time. I was a baker’s boy, I’d get up at 4.30am to help unload the van, stack all the shelves, go home and get ready for school.’
It’s that energy that has enabled him to clock up more than 1,100 episodes of The Chase and nearly 150 more of the celebrity version, not to mention 30 outings on Beat The Chasers and 19 of The Family Chase, as well as 50 appearances spinning the Wheel Of Fortune, 33 Blankety Blanks on BBC1 and 35 editions of Cash Trapped, a quiz he devised himself.
Walsh clearly likes to keep his options open. ‘He goes where the work is,’ one friend of the star says. ‘He just loves it and it doesn’t matter to him what channel he is on.’
As an actor, he has appeared as a Tardis companion in Doctor Who, tax-dodging Pop in The Larkins, and wise-cracking copper DS Ronnie Brooks in Law And Order: UK.
Then there were more than 300 appearances on Coronation Street as Danny Baldwin and three years on the half-forgotten ITV soap Night And Day… never mind being a regular guest on This Morning, Loose Women, Good Morning Britain and The One Show.
In other words, television just can’t do without Bradley Walsh. And if you don’t like him, good luck finding a show he isn’t on.
