Taking ketamine at 7am to kissing a schoolgirl half his age and hanging out with a murderer – inside the past life of Noel Fielding that would never be welcome in the GBBO tent
Noel was a surprise addition to the Bake Off line-up and we can now reveal all about his unsavoury antics
HE was a shock choice for the job, but GBBO host Noel Fielding seems to have won over the Great British public already.
The 44-year-old has sprinkled some of his own cheeky, unearthly charm over viewers and come out top, kind of ironically for someone who was sacked on his first day working at a cake shop, aged 14, for “lying on the floor eating the merchandise”.
Born on 21 May, 1973 and raised in South London, the eccentric star grew up with his brother, Michael.
He met fellow comedian Julian Barratt at art college and they formed the Mighty Boosh – a weird comedy troupe which propelled Noel to fame in the hit BBC2 show of the same name.
More mainstream fame came from his other off-beat roles, playing Richmond in Channel 4 sitcom The IT Crowd and as team captain opposite Phil Jupitus on Never Mind the Buzzcocks from 2009 to 2015.
Jupitus famously called him the “gothic George Best”.
Fame, however, led to drug addiction.
Noel says he has taken an A-Z of drugs including MDMA, magic mushrooms, cocaine, ecstasy and ketamine.
He explained: “I took too many drugs and was hanging out with the wrong people.
“MDMA is too strong for me. I took pills on the rave scene and didn’t like them at all.
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"It was like my birthday every day. All these people saying, ‘Do you want drugs?
"Do you want girls? Do you want drink?’
“You don’t really notice but gradually you end up out until 4am instead of 2am and then it would become 6am and 7am.
“Coke is always available if you want it.
"It wasn’t every night but I might do it once a week or something.
"It seems normal because you think everyone does it.
“When I took ketamine everything turned into two dimensions. I felt like I was in a weird puppet show.”
Noel quit drugs in 2006, saying: “I thought, ‘This is too much for my head, I won’t come back from this’.”
He’s got a whole list of famous mates, including Russell Brand who joked about Noel’s druggy past when he got the GBBO job, saying: “I think anything you bake should be run by a sniffer dog before anyone vulnerable tastes it.”
In his partying days, he once spent a night with actor Rhys Ifans handing out surgical gloves to people on the street.
He also partied with rock singer Courtney Love and junkie Libertines frontman Pete Doherty, saying: "I was at a party at Courtney Love's hotel room.
"Pete Doherty knocked on the door and he had a top hat with kittens in it.”
In the Noughties, he hung out with prolific party animals singer Amy Winehouse and Bob Geldof's daughter Peaches, and became a regular in Amy’s local, The Hawley Arms in Camden.
The dark-haired assassin reportedly has a number of famous conquests including The Kills frontwoman Alison Mosshart, Rod Stewart's daughter Kimberly and Kurt Cobain's widow Courtney Love, although he rubbishes the fling or that they once ‘trashed a hotel room’.
He hit headlines in 2007 when he was spotted “full-on snogging” Pixie Geldof in a club when she was 16 and still at school, and he was 22.
Noel said of Pixie at the time: “It caused a lot of problems because her dad wanted to kill me obviously.”
The prolific shagger also admitted he wasn't just interested in the opposite sex.
He once said: “Sometimes quite fancy men. But I couldn’t go any further. I did try, but decided it wasn’t for me.”
In 2010, he reformed his womanising ways and started dating Radio X DJ Lliana Bird and they now live together in Highgate.
But his pals aren’t all A-list… one of his mates is a convicted killer, Jimmy Browne, Amy Winehouse’s former bodyguard, who was once jailed for 18 years for manslaughter during a robbery.
Noel found himself “handcuffed and pinned to the ground” at 10am after a night of partying in 2010 when the minder was found with cocaine and methodone which he claims was from his last job and he was about to ‘dispose of’.
In 2000, Noel starred in a short film called Sweet, where he got his own soggy bottom out for sex scenes.
He ends up in bed with a man wearing nipple clamps and drinking Jack Daniels – something he’s probably not going to recreate with Paul Hollywood after an episode of GBBO wraps.
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