Paddy ‘The Baddy’ Pimblett and Molly ‘Meatball’ McCann are best friends and brilliant personalities. So how has this fly-on-the-wall series ended up so deeply awkward?

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: no. 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 badly-named 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 bad).