Paddy McGuinness breaks silence on joining Inside the Factory after replacing Gregg Wallace on BBC show
PADDY McGuinness couldn’t have timed it better to step into Gregg Wallace’s hairnet and overalls as our new guide to how our favourite foods are made – because his first gig was to stuff his face with chocolate seashells at the Belgian factory that makes Guylian!
While his co-star Cherry Healey visits the Long Clawson Dairy in Melton Mowbray in this festive special, to find out how Christmas classic blue Stilton is made, Paddy is surrounded by vats of molten Belgian chocolate, and dons a fetching hairnet for the first time.
“Actually for me, there’s not much hair to cover,” he laughs as he chatted to The Sun’s TV Mag and other press.
“You know, 20 years ago when I had a lovely thick head of hair, then that would have been a thing!”
Paddy, 51, admits that he was nervous about working with Cherry, as he’d never met her before.
“That’s always the tricky bit, you hope you get on,” he says. “But I’m telling you now, me and Cherry do so much laughing.
“As soon as I met her, we had the biggest talk and we just got on like that.
“This is testament to her – when I did my Children in Need challenge, she turned up in Kendal to surprise me – she even brought me up a lasagne she’d made!”
Inside The Factory returns with a new series in the new year, in which Paddy gets to go back to the Warburtons plant in Bolton where he had his first job. And, he says, it felt like a full circle moment.
“I drove in in this big heavy goods vehicle for the first shot,” he reveals.
“I thought: ‘I got my heavy goods licence doing Top Gear, now I’m driving into the place I used to work at 30-odd years ago, hosting another show for the BBC.’
“When I was that 16-year-old kid who used to walk to work with butties my mum had made me, who’d have thought all these years later, I’d have had all these amazing things go on in my life.
“It was one of those moments where I thought: ‘Bloody hell, life eh? It does have its twists and turns.’”
It was confirmed that Paddy had replaced Gregg Wallace on the show earlier this year.
Gregg, 60, had worked on the show for nine years but has faced controversy in recent weeks.
The Sun was told that Gregg was reported to BBC bosses after he was accused of taking his top off and boasting about his sex life to a woman on the show Impossible Celebrities in 2018.
Gregg stepped back from co-hosting Masterchef last week after complaints about inappropriate behaviour over a number of years.
But he bitterly said the allegations come from a “handful of middle-class women of a certain age”.
Inside the Christmas Factory airs tonight at 6.30pm on BBC One.