Is this why Bradley Walsh is rarely off our screens?

The Daily Mail postbag says all of it: ‘I like Bradley Walsh however he’s by no means off the TV display screen — and now we’ve got his son, Barney,’ writes Graham Deacon of Liverpool. ‘Bradley, please give us a break!’

‘Are there another TV presenters obtainable other than Bradley Walsh?’ asks Laurence Knott, of East Barnet in Hertfordshire.

‘When will Bradley Walsh be recruited to learn the information?’ inquires Gary Guymer of Lowestoft. ‘It’s about the one factor he hasn’t achieved on TV.’

Many extra readers are making the identical level they usually’re not alone.

He’s in every single place, on all the pieces: actor, comic, singer, quiz host, particular visitor and never least the doting dad of Barney, an aspiring all-rounder himself.

Bradley and Barney… as a heckler on the Glasgow Empire famously shouted when confronted with each Mike and Bernie Winters: ‘Oh Jesus, there’s two of them!’

Even schedulers on the BBC have realised that we’ve got reached Peak Walsh. Earlier this month, they have been pressured to take motion when the relaunch of Gladiators (introduced by Bradley, 63, and Barney, 26) was adopted by the return of Michael McIntyre’s Big Show — that includes particular visitor, er, Bradley Walsh.

As one more Mail correspondent, Margaret Nunn of Plymouth, identified, this wasn’t the half of it. That day — Saturday, January 13 — Bradley was scheduled to look in no fewer than ten totally different exhibits, together with The Chase Celebrity Special and Breaking Dad (a journey sequence with son Barney), each on ITV.

On high of that, Barney was showing on BBC1 hospital drama Casualty, the place he is a daily as diffident workers nurse Cam Mickelthwaite. Realising one thing needed to be achieved, the Beeb substituted on the final minute a distinct Michael McIntyre episode, assured to be Walsh-free.

But the respite did not final lengthy. Just per week later, on January 20, up popped Bradley on the Big Show on BBC1, the sufferer of a prank the place he was woken at 1am for a lunatic model of This Is Your Life.

‘He’s on virtually each present,’ admitted McIntyre, as he tiptoed to Bradley’s resort room in Sheffield. ‘He’s on the opposite channel, in all probability proper now.’ And who had set him up for the prank? Barney, after all.

Harsh however true, Barney’s weaknesses as a presenter are magnified by continuously showing in a double act together with his dad. He’s actually within the older man’s shadow.

During the opening episode of Gladiators, his hesitant timing was all too apparent throughout banter together with his father — and there are moments on Breaking Dad, particularly when Barney is striving to impress, when the usual isn’t any higher than a household dwelling video.

We’re left with the inevitable impression that Barney would not get a sniff at prime-time TV if he wasn’t driving on his father’s coat-tails. He’d do much better to comply with his personal path, nevertheless lengthy the path to success, as an alternative of on the lookout for shortcuts.

He’s not alone amongst nepo-babies on the lookout for a leg-up, after all. Miquita Oliver is never seen onscreen with out help from chef mum Andi; DJ Roman Kemp appears closely reliant on pop star dad and mom Martin and Shirlie; and we can’t even point out Brooklyn Beckham.

But even essentially the most brutal critic has to confess that Walsh Snr is exceptionally good at what he does.

In entrance of a baying crowd on the Gladiators area, he is effortlessly in management, build up the thrill to a manic pitch.

Bradley demonstrated the identical unshakeable confidence as he introduced the Royal Variety Performance on the Albert Hall final 12 months, treating the Prince and Princess of Wales with the identical good-humoured mockery he makes use of to tease contestants on his recreation present The Chase.

Despite the age-old protocol that entertainers mustn’t instantly deal with the royal field, he opened the present by welcoming their ‘royal highnesses’ — and joking: ‘It would not sound correct, your royal highnessesses? There’s too many ‘ssessesses’, innit?

‘It needs to be like cactus, cactuses, cacti. Your royal highness, highnesses and highni. That’s it. I’ve bought it. Your royal highni.’

Then he launched right into a routine about how he would not have a lot as an MBE, when different tv personalities get damehoods ‘for baking truffles’.

That’s the essence of what Bradley Walsh does. He can by no means be offensive, as a result of there’s all the time that cheeky twinkle, the nudge within the ribs that claims that is only a little bit of enjoyable.

His victims forgive him all the pieces. In one episode of The Chase, 13 years in the past, Bradley went to items as he learn out a query concerning the German Olympic skier Fanny Chmelar. He pronounced it ‘smeller’ earlier than he curled up in a ball, weeping helplessly. The clip went viral.

You would possibly assume poor Fanny would by no means forgive him — however there she was on McIntyre’s Big Show, ushered into Bradley’s resort room whereas he cowered underneath the sheets in nothing however a pair of boxer shorts.

Her surname, she knowledgeable him, is definitely pronounced ‘schmeeler’, and she or he broke into a smile as he yelped with laughter once more.

It’s this present for upsetting laughter with out placing folks’s backs up that makes Bradley a useful TV performer. Television is beamed proper into the guts of our properties. It tries to be all issues to all folks, and that’s deceptively tough. There’s no substitute for a family-friendly presenter.

Key to any channel’s success in signing ‘Bradders’ — as he is identified within the trade — is getting on the nice facet of Dan Baldwin, a tv manufacturing guru and shut buddy of the presenter. Walsh and Baldwin — whose manufacturing firm Hungry Bear makes Breaking Dad — are ‘just about inseparable,’ says an trade supply.

Baldwin additionally occurs to be ITV star Holly Willoughby’s husband, with the three of them seen collectively on the Variety Club awards in London final 12 months.

For a while, Baldwin’s dream has been to pair family-friendly Walsh together with his personal spouse. He virtually managed it in December 2019 with the screening of a pilot episode of Take Off With Bradley And Holly, which the BBC hoped could be the following Generation Game — just for Covid laws to make a commissioned sequence unattainable.

Phillip Schofield — now off our screens after revelations he had performed a long-standing affair with a colleague 34 years his junior — could have breathed a sigh of aid at its demise, for it was stated he wasn’t totally bought on Ms Willoughby having a brand new display screen companion.

Walsh, it needs to be stated, has benefited from a shrinking pool of household favourites. Half a century in the past, there have been scores of them. Bruce Forsyth, Tommy Trinder, Arthur Askey and Bob Monkhouse have been among the many greatest names, however producers had an array of others to select from — Nicholas Parsons, Ted Rogers, Jimmy Tarbuck, Leslie Crowther and extra.

Every Saturday night time noticed all-star exhibits hosted by comedians with a present for making grannies and schoolchildren roar with laughter on the identical jokes.

We nonetheless love the likes of Morecambe And Wise and The Two Ronnies at present. All these proficient artistes shared one factor in frequent, one thing that additionally applies to Bradley — they got here up the arduous manner.

The music halls have been lengthy gone by the point damage pressured Bradley to desert his hopes of being knowledgeable footballer at Brentford FC within the early Eighties. At 21, working as an apprentice at Rolls-Royce, he entered a expertise contest on vacation in Majorca — doing Norman Wisdom impressions.

A expertise spotter approached him afterwards and suggested him to audition as a Pontins ‘blue coat’ or campsite entertainer. That job led to gigs in working males’s golf equipment as a singer and stand-up, then to end-of-the-pier exhibits.

He spent a decade sharpening his timing and studying to work an viewers. By the time he made his first appearances on TV, on selection exhibits hosted by Cannon And Ball, and Des O’Connor, he was almost 30. That sort of expertise cannot be purchased or taught. There’s no straightforward different. The viewers laughs or they do not — however they by no means lie.

‘I did not actually begin studying until 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 tip of the primary month, you’ve got removed all of the garbage materials you do not want and impulsively, you are awake.’

He was helped by an unstoppable work ethic, inherited from his mom Margaret — an auxiliary nurse at a psychiatric hospital who labored a second job in a canteen, bringing in additional money after his father walked out.

‘I adopted the identical factor once I was younger,’ he stated, ‘ending up with about 4 jobs at one time. I used to be a baker’s boy, I’d stand up at 4.30am to assist unload the van, stack all of the cabinets, go dwelling and prepare for varsity.’

It’s that vitality that has enabled him to clock up greater than 1,100 episodes of The Chase and almost 150 extra of the celeb model, to not point out 30 outings on Beat The Chasers and 19 of The Family Chase, in addition to 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 maintain his choices open. ‘He goes the place the work is,’ one buddy of the star says. ‘He simply loves it and it would not matter to him what channel he’s 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 have been greater than 300 appearances on Coronation Street as Danny Baldwin and three years on the half-forgotten ITV cleaning soap Night And Day… by no means thoughts being a daily visitor on This Morning, Loose Women, Good Morning Britain and The One Show.

In different phrases, tv simply cannot do with out Bradley Walsh. And when you don’t love him, good luck discovering a present he is not on.