The Oral History of Nuts TV, the Pinnacle of Lad Culture Television

Whatever you come to think of Nuts TV, and you will come to think something about Nuts TV by the end of this, it was one of a kind. What other TV channel in history, future or conceivable imagination mixed Thatcher-supporting glamour models, cars stacked with baked beans, Hollywood guests, £100-a-night budgets, free bars, sports pundits in a shed, features called Blondes vs Brunettes and, in the heady height of the lads’ mag era, just about get away with it?

Launched in mid-September 2007 by digital media company ETV with a quickie promotional campaign and a smorgasbord of presenters aiming to excite bored British men, the channel revolved around cheap, madcap features and wink-wink titillation. Fit and Fearless plunged glamour models into a haunted house, North Vs. South pitted two teams from either side of the Watford Gap in a gameshow format and The Shed Sports Show rounded-up the latest sports news, presented in a garden cabin sponsored by WKD.

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The channel threw everything at the dartboard to see what would stick, aiming squarely at the contemporary, gormless lad: motors, girls, beer, gadgets, rock music and innuendo. Tastelessness was part of the recipe; the launch night’s opening sequence saw a “NUTS TV LAUNCH 2 DAY” cake grossly rearranged to “U CAN PAN 2 SLUTS TV”, Fawlty Towers-style. Does the anagram check out? Course not, does it even matter mate?

Nuts TV lasted six months before spaffing its limp budget up the studio wall. Fuelled by aims to bring a funnier, slightly more highbrow version of the mag to life, excitement soon turned to mass exodus as the show jolted towards nudity. Looking back, it ran during a strange centrefold in time: on one side, the end of the lads’ mag era, on the other, in its attempts at user-generated content and virality, the dawn of social media. Outdated yet also ahead of its time, undoubtedly misogynistic but strangely tame in content, it now makes for a bizarre, uncomfortable watch.

Notably, it spawned the careers of dozens of now decorated industry mainstays working on The One Show, Radio 2 and even an Oscar-winning film company (former Nuts TV day producer Adam Mitchenall at Grain Media). As this year marks the 15th anniversary of its launch, all share a mix of embarrassment, pragmatic acceptance and erstwhile fondness for Nuts TV, agreeing on there being a genuine sense of family – best highlighted by the marriages and actual families that the show produced.

Largely lost, erased from pop culture history and detuned from Freeview sets, we’ve reassembled a vast amount of the crew to share their memories, using salvaged diaries, email correspondences and found footage stored on DVDs at their mum’s house to fill in the gaps. You’re in for a ride.

How Nuts TV got started

Lubna Bhatti (producer): It was a company called ETV – they were launching this new channel on satellite that was sports but glamour – it I didn’t really realise until we got there that it was going to be a kind of lads’ mag. I was the only female producer, and I’d worked on The Big Breakfast. They wanted that energy and they wanted TFI Friday and they wanted a bit of Jonathan Ross, and this mishmash was of nothing in particular. They were trying to get access to an indoor beach in Watford to do girls playing volleyball on the beach and sending out people to get little films and VTs [pre-recorded features]. It was exciting to be at the launch of a new programme.

Steve Marsh (presenter): We [Marsh and co-presenter Dan Wright from beloved CBeebies show Big Cook, Little Cook] were part of five or six fledgling Freeview channels and had done around ten or 15 pilots, so the Nuts TV gig was one of many. It felt like there were channels popping up and going off within weeks. I remember being taken to dinner and they gave us a copy of Shortlist and said this is what they were aiming for.

Jake Yapp (comedy writer): It was designed to be a Big Breakfast. It was unbelievably cheap. And it was very cheerful. It was just fun – that was the idea, that we were just having a stupid party.

The cast of 'Derry Girls' in school uniform.

Nuts TV and ‘Nuts’ magazine

Watson: Because the magazine had nothing to do with the channel at all, they hated the fact that there was a Nuts TV and made any promo as small as possible. We had to rely on going around to pubs and strip clubs – I remember at one they threw pints of beer at us as we left, they were going crazy. It was a riot.

Marsh: It was actually a loose link to the magazine. Lots of shows were very much guerrilla, coming off the back of things like TFI Friday and it had many of the same production team. I think they had ambitions to be more highbrow than the magazine.

Tim Verrinder (series director): We were interested in the entertainment and music side, having fun. There were certain boxes that we had to tick editorially to not ostracise the Nuts readers – but we were trying to get in a whole new audience because obviously the magazine alienated half the population as it was just aimed at blokes.

Marn Davies: They’d always intended it to be separate; you weren’t going to see any naked flesh as such, it was meant to be more titillation and a bit of sauciness.

The explosive launch of Nuts TV

From Jake Yapp’s diary:

Rehearsals begin tomorrow, proper rehearsals of the whole four-hour long live show. Gareth [Collett, Director of Programmes for ETV] was showing some Turner [the TV conglomerate that launched Nuts TV] bosses around, men in suits. As Gareth talked earnestly about cost effectiveness and audience reach, they walked past a gigantic bucking bronco and the studio editor in his suite, cutting together footage of cars covered in baked beans. And then the disabled toilet door swung open and out came a man in a gorilla suit.

Yapp: I said at 9PM on launch day, 300,000 young men are going to be sat in their living rooms with their trousers around their ankles thinking, ‘This is going to be the best night of television I’ve ever seen’ and they’re not going to get what they were expecting because we didn’t have any nudity. I thought, ‘God, we’re gonna have to be so funny we laugh their trousers back on.’ This is the greatest entertainment challenge of all time.

Bhatti: I remember Gareth [one of the bosses] getting on a rodeo and making us have a go. He was saying that we’re going to get this blonde and brunette on here and get everyone to wager who would last longer with little bars on the screen moving about. We were coming up with ideas to see if they’d work and cover a couple of minutes.

Tim Verrinder: One thing I loved about the whole setup… is it just changed. So you know, we brought in a whole corridor and they got in different graffiti artists to do different artworks down the corridor. So it started off as one long white corridor [on launch night], and by the end it had turned into some sort of crazy graffiti artwork.

Yapp: There’s the opening six minutes of the first ever broadcast on YouTube and I’m in that pretending to be a German in the dressing room with [“Starz in Their Eyes” singer] Just Jack.

Just Jack: No recollection, not exactly a highlight. There’s your quote.

The most chaotic moments of Nuts TV

Bhatti: We’d send someone down to Selfridges to buy insect lollies and maggot chocolates and get blondes and brunettes to do an eat-off. We had the Lazy Boys Corner – we dragged guys off the street in Battersea where the studio was, gave them a beer and put them on the show and they’d often just freeze.

Marsh: Sometimes they were genuine viewers who’d written in and they’d just sit there and we’d throw to them.

Borg: My favourite show, though, was when we had Paul Daniels and Debbie McGee on and they were on opposing teams for North Vs. South. I remember Debbie McGee got really upset because one of us swore. We’d done a lot of research into Paul Daniels and found he liked Pontefract cakes because he was from that neck of the woods. The only thing we got told you can’t do with Debbie McGee is swear. So I think one of the presenters did to see what happened. She didn’t like it.

Yapp: We got [Page 3 girl] Lucy Pinder in a hotel in Knightsbridge and filmed her lounging around on the bed reading softcore parodies of out-of-copyright stuff like Alice in Wonderland that I’d written. She did a cold read and a fantastic job. The only word she stumbled on was in a story I’d written about a perfume. “Do you mean Bugatti?” she said. No.”You khahi?” I had to say it’s from the Japanese word “to splash” and she was like “Oh, God!”

Borg: I presented with Lucy Pinder. We did a couple of shows with her. I remember her telling me just before we went live once that her hero was Margaret Thatcher. Then it was like, you’re live: “Welcome to Nuts TV!”

The Obourne family sat on a sofa with pet

Limited budgets and unlimited hours

Yapp: We were making a show on a budget of £100 a night for a four hour-long live TV show. You’d get amazing guests like a big film star and they’d be like you need to send a car to so and so. The producer would have to be like, can they make their own way there and they’d say what are you talking about? We had to tell them we didn’t have a budget for cars – it was insane.

Borg: The amount of money we had was so small we had to be inventive and come up with things around it. It was a never-ending hole, week-after-week we just poured content into this hole, it was brilliant. Because of that, some of it was absolute toss, but there would be little bits of diamond. Everyone worked 1,000 hours a week for no money, it was a hardcore time.

Bhatti: We were never allowed any money for pens or printing as there was no money. There was no money for meals when working late. Jake made this film about a plea – Please Give this Nuts TV Person a Pen – it was really quite funny, like WaterAid. First, there was this real kind of excitement and then it was like, how can you treat us like this? How are we supposed to print things? What do you mean, no pens?

The office of Nuts TV. Photo: Courtesy of Tim Verrinder

Looking back at toxic ‘Nuts’ attitudes

Bhatti: The boys would always be really sexist in the office. The Leona Lewis video used to come on and they’d make these gross comments about her and one day someone said, you do realise that Roman Lewis [a producer there] is Leona Lewis’s brother? And he just didn’t say anything.

Sarah Champion (music correspondent): Some time later, on another job – one that paid! – I happened to meet the same cab driver who had driven me to the Nuts TV set. This part I remember, because it smarted a bit. In the general chatter about the channel and why I no longer worked for them, I was informed word had got around they sacked me because “men don’t want to be told what to listen to by women”.

Bhatti: I spent ages trying to find female motorheads, but “they had to be hot” and blah blah blah. These poor girls would be like, we go to car conventions all over the UK – they’d know their stuff. And we’d just be like, no love. I couldn’t say, “My boss doesn’t think your tits aren’t big enough”, but I couldn’t believe I was doing this and having these conversations. You became conditioned to it… like, let’s go shoot some girls in bikinis playing beach volleyball. It makes me cringe. There’s a certain amount of it was a mishmash of boys’ fantasies over some girls and getting on as many glamour models as we can, it wasn’t of any value.

Yapp: I remember in the early days we’d say “women” or “performers”… It became shorthand and normalised after a few weeks to say “get a few girls in” in a semantic change. We did get more blasé. In the auditions for the Nuts TV Girls some of the men were excited and were saying we should get them to take all their clothes off and others of us had to hold the line and say “absolutely not”. It would be like, stop.

Davies: Unfortunately, there was an element [of Carry On-type content] and that’s what made my toes curl as well, because I was as guilty as anyone of still being a bit laddish like that at that time. It was the fag end of lad culture, a fag end that should have been stubbed out.

Looking back at that 32-year-old version of myself, there is an element of toe-curling embarrassment, also, because of how culturally these things have moved on. I’m not surprised, for example, that Lynsey Hipgrave or Zoe Hardman [the show’s presenters] don’t want to talk about it. It may be more embarrassing as a woman having sort of willingly been involved in that.

Watson: It’s probably the only job I’ve ever had, where I didn’t feel incredibly uncomfortable because someone was perving. They were all amazing people. I don’t think I had an issue with anyone, the only problem I personally had was other models getting jealous because I had a friendship with some of the people – I was a bridesmaid four years ago for one of the cameramen. It was one of the best jobs I’ve ever done.

From backstage to the green room

Bhatti: Ron Jeremy was a guest, so was Jenna Jameson, Warwick Davis, Huggy Bear. Some of them were really big names so we were just throwing money. When you’re booking shows you don’t usually pay people money – it was chaotic.

Borg: We got good guests on the show. We had RZA from Wu Tang Clan. The guests would hang out in the bar we had on set and we had a comedian who didn’t actually drink but put his fake tan on and pretended to be an Aussie bartender.

Bhatti: There would be this little bar for optics – you’d have this green room cutting to it like Jonathan Ross. Everyone would go in there and just get trashed.

George Takei backstage at Nuts TV. Photo: Courtesy of Tim Verrinder

Watson: We had a famous footballer who had played for England when we won the World Cup – I had no idea who he was. I tried to order my dinner from him – everyone was wetting themselves in the control room. It became a joke – every night they’d say, “We’re going to put the footage out tonight”.

Tim Verrinder: We had Katy Perry on, it was one of the first places she performed.

Davies: Adele performed on the show. I remember standing in the studio thinking, wow she’s pretty good and her backing singers are, too. I’m sure someone interviewed Amy Winehouse. I remember Michael Winner being chauffeur-driven and his Rolls Royce and his chauffeur crashed the car into one of the bollards. Top Gear at the time was popular with its reasonably priced cars feature so I managed to get a pedal go-kart. Any time a celebrity was on, we saw who could do the fastest lap time through the corridors of the studio and out the back. I remember Ashley Walters doing it… I saw him a few years ago and he didn’t want to remember.

Rotten reviews for Nuts TV

Borg: I remember being in a pub toilet once and there was an advert for Nuts TV in front of me. A guy next to me went “Oh my god! I watched your show and think it’s brilliant”. It was the only time I ever got recognised for Nuts TV – having a piss in a urinal in a really shit pub. I remember Charlie Brooker doing a review and we were all very excited that [it was] Charlie Brooker, who at the time, wrote Screenwipe. And the line that sticks out in my mind was he said: “It looks like it’s powered by actual piss.”

Yapp: There’s an incredible irony that this piece which was so scathing came before Nick-Vaughn Smith, one of the Nuts TV producers, ended up becoming Charlie Brooker’s producer on Weekly Wipe and I ended up becoming a contributor.

Bhatti: It had been live for a few months with quite good spirits and we were feeling quite hopeful about the whole thing. Then this article was damning, it drew attention to the channel for all the wrong reasons.

Capture d'écran de Willow Creek 'Les Sims 4' via EA Games

What happened to Nuts TV? The beginning of the end

From Jake Yapp’s diary:

One segment that had grown in prominence in the last few weeks of 2007 had been the Secret Diary of a Nuts Girl. It was a little five minute package that followed a young model around a typical day, going to the gym, doing a little shopping and then going and taking their clothes off for money. We didn’t show any nudity and it was all harmless fun…. In January this metamorphosized into Confessions of a Nuts Girl, when one of the Producer Directors would go to a photoshoot for the magazine and film a five minute interview with them talking about how they once had sex in a skip or whatever.

In mid January, I became dimly aware of a bit of a commotion at the end of the office nearest the greenroom studio. We were told we couldn’t go down the corridor for a bit. Floor managers took guard at the doorway.

I went past and saw drapes being taken down in the green room along with a white background. What were they filming in there? I asked Francis, the floor manager. Oh, Confession of a Nuts Girl, said Francis. What? Yeah, that’s why it had to be a closed set. What, you mean as in taking their clothes off? Yeah.

Line crossed, game over, moral bankruptcy. It felt really weird, sinister. Everyone was carrying on as normal, but it just felt weird. It was as if you knew an animal had died in that room. It had that kind of horrible miasma of post-wrongness to it, like the crowd filing out of the bullfight stadium.

In the office, whatever laddish jokes were cracked, however ludicrous the lines may have been, the intention was now there, and they [the CEOs] had the power. And they were starting to use it. It was time to go.

Marsh: Nuts TV had started off with about 20 people in a production meeting with everyone throwing ideas around. Within six weeks it was seven people and then four and then before you know it, you see certain parts of the scripts have been copied and pasted from the last week.

Davies: I think it hit its peak around that sort of November, December, coming out Christmas. Everyone could tell it was starting to get worse. There was that general feeling that the novelty had worn off and we were running on fumes – what little fumes that were, anyway. It was meant to be tongue in cheek but there was a feedback loop of irony. There was a smugness about it, leaning into the fact that it was low rent, but it’s a joke that wears thin. I’d now describe it as pub fun – if you were round a table with your mates over four pints it would be funny at the moment – but not something you’d want to commit to videotape or indeed broadcast it.

The demise of Nuts TV

From Jake Yapp’s diary:

We were told there would be an important meeting that evening and attendance was compulsory. Such were the variety of theories that I decided to become a bookie, taking bets from people on what the meeting was announcing: “Fanny on air: 3-1…Pay Rises for all: 600-1”. [The director of TV] – a burly guy who always looked like he’d come from a good lunch or a fight or both – had become prone to a little habitual sequence of nervous mannerisms every time he came into the office. He would come in with his motorbike helmet, run a hand through his hair, adjust his belt, adjust his balls, look at me and say “fuck”.

After doing the belts-balls-fuck he said he was so sorry and that Turner have rejected our proposals [to save the platform]. I made about seven quid on the sweepstake. No one was particularly devastated. “We had something special,” he said. I wanted to laugh out loud that his stupid shit tits-but-no-tits TV channel had been put out of the nation’s misery and he’s actually upset.

“I know each and every one of you worked as hard as you could to make this the excellent show it is, but here’s the thing, we want to go out with a bang so keep up that high standard to the end,” his voice cracked. “It was a hell of a run.” He walked out and brushed a tear from his eye. We looked at each other and shrugged.

Tim Verrinder: I was over in LA, not quite at a pool with a cocktail in my hand, but that sort of thing. I got a phone call from the head honchos saying it had been pulled and it was a bit of a shock.

Watson: I remember the absolute last shot – we were all sitting on the big round sofa watching the memories on the screen – then it spins round to us and we’re sitting there crying and I’m waving at the screen. We wrote on every single wall that was in there and I smashed Jake’s face into a chocolate cake.

Davies: The biggest irony is… they had the wrap leaving party on one of those moored boats on the Thames. It felt like the ship was finally sinking. I remember everyone getting absolutely [trashed]… It was debauched. It felt like the big release of everything, so many people being sick and passing out, it felt like an exorcism.

Watson: One of the bosses was really drunk on the last night and said we should definitely stay in touch and if you come down I’ll give you that big pink mirror from the Blonde Vs. Brunette corner. I made my mum drive all the way there – I didn’t remind him or anything – I just turned up and got it and put it in my car. I only got rid of it about three years ago.

@kylemacneill