The TV show John Lydon could never respect: “I don’t care how much money it is”
Despite the numerous TV credits to his name, apparently, there is one mammoth show that John Lydon has avoided like the plague.
Penty of his programming cameos got up the nose of the punk faithful. Some were harmless enough, Channel 5 and the Discovery Channel sending Lydon out to hang out with bugs, apes, and sharks for a run of nature shows where he did a good job as an enthusiastic presenter.
Others induced some wincing. It’s likely many an old Sex Pistols fan failed to be endeared by his Country Life butter ads, the late 2000s commercial seeing the former ‘Anarchy in the UK’ insurrectionist playing the part of a tweed-twit larking about in the English countryside. Still, few would have complained when such Faustian pacts funded his successor band Public Image Ltd’s return after a good 17 years away from the stage and the studio.
But Lydon’s happy to sink deeper into the trashy TV swill. He dipped his toe as early as 1997, when he defended himself from an old touring drummer’s small claims lawsuit on Judge Judy. Seven years later, he’d sign up to ITV’s I’m a Celebrity…Get Me Out of Here! jungle reality show, sending producers in a panic for the second time in his life when he decided to drop a “fucking cunts” during a live broadcast.
Funnily enough, there were as few as 91 complaints compared to the tabloid apoplection back in 1976 when the Sex Pistols’ swears on the Today programme triggered the ‘Filth and the Fury’ headlines during punk’s insurrectionist spark.
Despite such a distinguished small screen CV, there’s one household TV show that Lydon has steered well clear of, no matter how much they badger for an appearance. “Discreet inroads were made on their part towards me,” he confessed to journalist Darryl Sterdan in 2012 regarding music panel show American Idol. “But no is the answer. I can’t support a karaoke system. I don’t care how much money it is. I don’t want it. It’s not worth it.”
This isn’t entirely true. Back in 2007, Lydon joined the likes of Bif Naked and The Cult’s Billy Duffy as a judge on Fuse TV’s Bodog Music Battle of the Bands, a tacky, Ed Hardy-tattooed nightmare of a show that bottled everything awful about the decade’s blingy kitsch, as well as unleashing the utterly moribund Fall From Grace to the rock airwaves as the show’s winner.
What separated such dross from American Idol is hard to say, as the 7,000-odd contestants that Fall From Grace were a part of must have been just as much a karaoke endurance test for the PiL frontman.
Ultimately, perhaps he’d just rather stand behind the mic? Around cutting embarrassingly trite ‘anti-woke’ songs like ‘Being Stupid Again’ and backing the Conservatives for government on Piers Morgan Uncensored, Lydon donned a costume not once, but twice for The Masked Singer. His late-life right-wing buffoonery and habit of running his mouth off aptly saw him play the part of the Jester and the Yak, once again to fund a new PiL album, while his US version cameo touchingly was a surprise reveal to his wife, who was suffering from Alzheimer’s and set to watch his appearance unawares.
