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Sleb Safari: Get Buzzin' With Bez down the park

Maeve Connoly

Maeve Connolly

Maeve is the deputy digital editor at The Irish News. She has worked for the company since 2000.

Bez and Happy Mondays in their natural habitat
Bez and Happy Mondays in their natural habitat Bez and Happy Mondays in their natural habitat

IN lockdowns one and two Joe Wicks and Gregg with two Gs Wallace were urging us to get our butts with two Ts off the sofa. Didn’t work for Sleb Safari.

Joe Wicks is a bit energetic for nine in the morning. Sleb Safari has never got on board with pre-work workouts. It’s just too much work before work. And Gregg’s sessions are great to watch, what with the bear crawls around the hall and ski sits in the dining room, but Sleb Safari never goes further than watching in wonderment.

Praises be for the new health hero of lockdown number three (and its friend lockdown 3.1). Step on forward Bez, the dancing, maraca-shaking, Happy Mondays hype man. You might say he had the easiest job in the world.

Like so many of us Bez has overindulged and under exercised during the lengthy periods of enforced confinement but he’s decided to start online fitness classes to help others in the same predicament.

Bez is on a health kick. Picture from Get Buzzin' With Bez on YouTube
Bez is on a health kick. Picture from Get Buzzin' With Bez on YouTube Bez is on a health kick. Picture from Get Buzzin' With Bez on YouTube

Bez is frank about his physical state. Here’s 2020 summed up: “Last lockdown all I’ve done is booze and eat cake... I feel like my knees are seizing up.”

And 2021? "I've started this new year seriously unfit, with a fat belly and creaky hips, and I can't stop eating chocolate.”

Sleb Safari feels seen.

Bez’s YouTube fitness series is called Get Buzzin’ With Bez and he is guided by personal trainer Andy who will remain in a bubble with Bez for the duration of this health kick – a Bez bubble, if you will.

The first episode is the stuff of legend. As sleet falls, Bez – who is surely wearing every item of clothing he owns – explains that he’s 56, a granddad and needs “to make some changes”.

“I’m going to do some yoga, some hypnosis and kick that sugar habit and give up the booze. Maybe.” So far, so good.

Andy the shorts-wearing trainer suggests they warm up with a run around the park and Bez sets off at a canter, cheerfully telling his trainer that he hasn’t gone running since 1999.

After that it’s shoulder taps, high knees, squats and the like while Andy gets colder and colder on the sidelines. Another 15 minutes and Andy would have rubbed his hands away altogether.

The day after he filmed that first episode Bez told BBC Breakfast that it had been a real struggle to motivate himself to do it.

"I was limping down to the park. Thinking 'Oh my God, it's snowing, sleeting. It's horrible. What am I doing?'”

Bez, we’ve all been there. Only Joe Wicks bounces out of bed thinking about squat thrusts and mountain climbers instead of tea and toast. Bez’s dodgy knees, lack of motivation and love of chocolate is so much more relatable and that’s why he’s exactly the kind of person Sleb Safari wants to be exercising alongside (in its living room, far from any sleet and snow.) Here’s hoping the maracas make an appearance soon.

Jordan North's DMs have gotten weird

JORDAN ‘Happy Place’ North has been finding out what happens once you leave the I’m A Celebrity camp and return to the real world.

“Before you go into the castle they brief you and warn you about things, but they never tell you that your DMs get pretty weird. Couples as well, random couples asking if I want to join in. There’s one who keeps sending me photos. I’m not looking though, I’ve blocked it,” he explained on his podcast Help I Sexted My Boss.

“I just need to stop reading my messages. I learned my lesson a couple of Sundays ago. As I was scrolling through, I opened a picture. Never again, I nearly choked on my brew.”

To think that this was a man who was so scared to abseil down a cliff on the show that he vomited.

Elizabeth Hurley and Paddinton Bear have a lot in common

ELIZABETH Hurley, Sleb Safari’s favourite wearer of gilets, has found herself a lockdown hobby – making marmalade. Forty seven jars of it to be precise.

Liz shared an update on her social media accounts: “Lockdown has turned me into a demented housewife: 47 jars of marmalade are nestling in my larder and another sack of Seville oranges await me”

Sleb Safari only hopes she is wearing an apron over those gilets. Marmalade making is a messy business, just ask Paddington Bear. Sleb Safari would love to see Liz and Paddington host a one-off marmalade-making tutorial on YouTube. Liz might prefer a jam making part in Paddington 3. Either way, please let's see this culinary collaboration.

RSPB NI competition winner

CONGRATULATIONS to Brenda McElroy, from Clogher in Co Tyrone, who has won the bumper bird box from RSPB NI ahead of its annual Big Garden Birdwatch which is taking place between Friday January 29 and Sunday January 31.

You can find out more about the Big Garden Birdwatch and register to take part by visiting www.rspb.org.uk/birdwatch

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