Paddy & Molly: Show No Mersey
Watching these MMA fighters limp through this awkward show is just painful
that Meijer could not be trusted, “I really struggled with what to do,” she says. Fearing being misled again, she decided to pursue Meijer for a second sample – this time with her eyes open.
Vanessa recalls Meijer’s indifferent response after she confronted him: “Why are you surprised? If I’d been honest with you, would you have chosen me?”
Probably not, Vanessa agreed – but at least she would have had all the facts. “I didn’t have a fair choice. That’s what hurt the most.”
Vanessa cherishes her children, but Meijer’s betrayal upended her life. “My trust in people was gone, pulverised almost beyond repair.”
Meijer declined to be interviewed for the documentary. He did meet once with director Allott, who recalls being given Meijer’s stock response “about just wanting to help” and maybe getting carried away.
“He was painting himself as the saviour of all these people,” says Allott. But the picture assembled of Meijer, from the women’s testimonials and his messages to them, shows “very calculated behaviour”.
Vanessa remembers him complimenting her, and engaging flirtatiously: “He took advantage of me … Somehow I fell for it, and got caught in the trap.”
For her children, the consequences will be lifelong. Meijer was so prolific within pockets of the Netherlands that one mother interviewed for the series discovered she had used the same donor as a colleague by chance.
Half-siblings have stumbled upon one another at playgrounds, seeding fears of incest in later life. “You have to prepare your kids for things you shouldn’t have to prepare them for,” says Vanessa, growing emotional. “It’s unfair – he has stolen their freedom.”
For now, all Vanessa has told her children about Meijer is that he “helped Mummy to become a mum” and is dishonest. “I can’t imagine how the mums of the teenage children are dealing now.”
But Meijer’s impact was not confined to the Netherlands. When Australian couple Laura and Kate (not their real names) wanted to start a family, they turned to Cryos, the world’s largest sperm bank. From more than 1,000 international donors, they selected Meijer, listed under a pseudonym.
Cryos assures prospective mothers that each donor abides by regional quotas. But while seeking their children’s half-siblings on Facebook, Laura and Kate were contacted by a Dutch mother who broke the news of Meijer’s notoriety.
They had been expecting to share their sperm donor with a handful of families worldwide, says Laura – “not five here, 100 there, 300 in another place … It really did feel like a personal loss.”
Most banks require men wanting to give sperm to undergo physical and psychological assessments pre-approval, but with no global oversight or regulation of donors, applicants are taken at their word.
The possibility of a serial donor was never raised through the process with Cryos, says Laura. She still does not know how many halfsiblings her children have around the world. “For me as a parent, that is a grievance – it hurts your heart.”
Ahead of the series’ launch on Netflix, the UK’s Human Fertilisation & Embryology Authority circulated advice for families with donor-conceived children, acknowledging that it “may be stressful and upsetting” – while reassuring them of the safeguards in place.
But the wider fertility industry’s part in enabling Meijer was the push Hill needed to pitch to Netflix, she says. “There was just no way for those families to find out the truth. They did do their research … You just wouldn’t expect someone to lie about something so important.”
The most disturbing takeaway is that Meijer is far from the only man to be working the system. “It does need an overhaul, and for the banks to be held to account as much as the individuals who abuse them,” says Hill.
In the Netherlands, moves are afoot to create a national spermdonor registry, but what’s needed is a globally-networked, nonprofit DNA database, says Hill: “That is the only effective way to know if people are lying.”
The women wronged by Meijer have had to carry out their own investigation. When he claimed in court last year that he’d stopped donating in 2019, they informed the judge of seven women presently pregnant with his offspring.
Meijer was barred from making further donations to Dutch clinics – but Vanessa remembers the victory as bittersweet. “We were like,
‘Well, he ain’t gonna stop’ ... It’s an obsession.”
Meijer is still posting videos from far-flung locales (most recently Zanzibar), some defending himself against his public portrayal. Vanessa believes that he is still donating, and using the cash to fund and plan his travel.
She has not had any contact with Meijer since she spoke to the media, but says that he has dismissed her online as bitter and attention-seeking. That’s not the case, says Vanessa, who is now in a relationship. “I wanted to participate in this documentary to make women aware … and I really, really want him to stop.”
The ancient question, asked for millennia, the one our ancestors used to ask the gods at the top of great mountains: are athletes actually interesting when they are not throwing or catching a ball? There is a lot of evidence to suggest that the answer is “well:
But does it really matter?” Look at the Sports Personality of the
Year award. Look at basically any post-game interview in any sport. Read any athlete’s autobiography apart from Andre Agassi’s. As argued better than I’ll ever touch it by David Foster Wallace in How Tracy Austin Broke My Heart, elite athletes necessarily have to have quite an uninteresting personality so they can have unshakeable focus when the heat is on. Intrusive intellectual thoughts can scupper a match-point. That’s why Cole Palmer is so good at penalties.
Paddy “The Baddy” Pimblett, then, is one of sport’s outliers. As a man of a certain age – and I have spoken to many friends about this, and we have all fallen to the curse – I have found myself losing hours to the Liverpudlian MMA fighter’s hypnotic YouTube channel. BBC Three has tried to capture it with this week’s extraordinarily badlynamed Paddy & Molly: Show No Mersey (a genuine offer to the BBC: I’ll come in when you announce the names of things, and bluntly tell you if they are bad, to avoid the embarrassment of Show No Mersey happening again. This one is If you’ve not seen his channel, I’ll summarise: in the week before a fight, we’ll see him do a few low-contact sessions at the gym, before flying to Las
Vegas, getting in a series of hot baths, and trying to cut weight. Cutting weight is quite tedious but you watch it anyway. Then Paddy will go and get weighed, roar to a crowd of MMA fans (35-year-old men in backwards baseball caps), then drink a gallon of water. At some point, in a crowded lift, Paddy will fart and say “it’s proper bad, that, lad. bad”. Then he’ll win the fight in a way we don’t see, come off stage, quick press conference, eat four burgers. We see him three days later again in Liverpool and he’s gained three stone, all on his face. I could watch a hundred of these in a row.
Which makes it all the more puzzling that Paddy & Molly – more or less the same format exactly, albeit with the addition of Pimblett’s best friend and fellow MMA fighter Molly “Meatball” McCann – is so much less entertaining. This is due to two fairly crucial alterations: firstly, a frenetic BBC Three-style edit, a real “MTV in 2012” throwback (within the first four minutes of the show I have heard snippets of about 10 songs, the screen keeps scratching like old film, and there are some joyless idents of Paddy and Molly punching listlessly at the camera). Secondly, there’s a bizarro attempt at the old-fashioned Made in Chelsea and Towie-style “you two go over there and have a chat on a balcony” thing which Paddy and Molly are not equipped for.
This isn’t to say the pair are unentertaining or uncharismatic – they are objectively not – but they keep getting forced into these strange scenes that don’t suit their energy or their personalities or their interpersonal dynamic, and it’s genuinely uncomfortable to see them limp their way through it. Put Paddy Pimblett in front of a camera and let him get a head of steam up and he’ll say one of the funniest things a modern sportsperson has ever uttered. Have him prone on a sofa with his manager asking “how you feeling?” nine times in a row and you won’t get the same magic.
So it feels like a missed opportunity. There are many moments when Paddy and Molly approach saying something interesting about their sport: it’s interesting that two working-class friends made it to the big leagues of MMA, that they have both overcome injuries and defeat, how they analyse their wins and losses, every time they mention the dark pits of doom they fall into when a fight doesn’t go their way. But every time they get close to saying something like that, there’s a quick edit, another blast of a Wombats song, then we cut to a weirdly forced scene where Molly meets with two wordless men she’s starting a gin brand with. I don’t care about a gin brand! Tell me how it felt when your fight plan unravelled in seconds and you got kneed in the face! We climb back to the top of the mountain. Not this time.
Every time they are about to say something interesting, there’s a blast of a Wombats song