Paddy & Molly: Show No Mersey, BBC Three, review: cut the chat and get to the fighting

Paddy & Molly: Show No Mersey (BBC Three) is not, as I assumed, a show starring Paddy McGuinness. There is one corner of the BBC that remains McGuinness-free. Instead, it’s a reality show about Paddy “The Baddy” Pimblett and Molly “Meatball” McCann, two mixed martial artists and best friends from Liverpool.

They compete in the Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) which, on this evidence, makes professional boxing look like playtime at preschool. “I’m going to go in that cage,” announces Molly before a fight, “and rip her f---ing head off.” She doesn’t quite do that, but she does pull her opponent’s arm out of its socket.

Paddy headed into a fight with Tony Ferguson, who had just trash-talked him at the pre-fight press conference. “I want to try and elbow him in his head 48 times and rearrange his f---ing face,” Paddy said. You may be able to tell from these quotes that Paddy and Molly do not have Muhammad Ali’s poetic way with words.

So both are straight-talkers. Admittedly, about 50 per cent of that talk is about Liverpool, which they consider to be the greatest city on earth. “It blows my mind that two kids from Liverpool can come to Vegas and shut it down,” they say at one point, and they are stars in this world – The Rock is among Molly’s celebrity fans. I’d be interested to know more about the financial rewards of the sport, though, as both seem to live pretty modestly.

I also wanted to see more of the fighting, but that’s because a lot of this show is about what Paddy likes to eat (Chinese meals, burgers, pizzas; “He’s like a wheelie bin,” says Molly), and Molly launching a gin brand, and other day-to-day stuff that is the bread-and-butter of humdrum reality shows. Molly plans her wedding; Paddy’s girlfriend is expecting twins. The series is much better when it focuses on the fights and the preparation, including the extreme process of dieting and dehydrating to cut weight – in Paddy’s case, being wrapped in hot towels and going nil by mouth except for a few chews of gum.

MMA fans aside, this is a show aimed at the demographic that the BBC is desperate to attract: young, northern and working class. And if it reaches them with one of Pimblett’s messages – that men should talk about their mental health, a subject close to his heart after he struggled with depression and one of his friends took his own life – then it can only be a good thing.