In the courtyard outside an Edinburgh hotel, a boy barely in his teens excitedly asks Noel Edmonds for a selfie. The former presenter seems surprised, but it might be a bit of an act: he is, after all, one of the most recognisable faces in Britain. And since his brief but compelling turn on last year’s I’m A Celebrity… Get Me Out Of Here!, Edmonds’ appeal has become what he calls “intergenerational”. His teenage stepson’s mates have looked him up on YouTube and were, he says, wowed by his appearance “introducing a band at some massive gig at Wembley”. (They mean Live Aid, where Edmonds’ company also provided all of the helicopter transport.)

So now he is familiar to the kids of 2019, as well as those of us who grew up with him in the 1970s (presenting Multi-Coloured Swap Shop and Top Of The Pops), 1980s (The Late Late Breakfast Show, Telly Addicts), 1990s (Noel’s House Party) or 2000s (Deal Or No Deal). House Party, his madcap teatime show featuring sidekick Mr Blobby and the fictional village of Crinkley Bottom, reached a peak of 15 million viewers on BBC One. It is difficult to think of anyone else who has had so many mainstream hits, over such a long period of time. For a bloke who can’t sing, dance, act or even really tell a joke, he’s an unlikely king of British light entertainment. What is Noel Edmonds’ secret?

“People are always asking me that,” he says. “I tell them to mind their own business. Go and learn something for yourself. Be curious, that’s all I ask of people. I’m not going to tell you where the gold is buried until you come over to my side.”

He says he doesn’t watch much TV and isn’t particularly bothered about being on it. A show with his Jungle sidekick Harry Redknapp is said to be in production, but, “I have another life. I live in a lovely part of France. I have business interests in Dubai, Monaco and all over the world. If people think I am a failure because I am not on telly every day, that is their problem.”

Edmonds is in Edinburgh to attend Lloyds bank’s AGM. His mission is to disrupt the event, just as he did last year, by cross-examining those at the top about the banking fraud that Edmonds blames for bringing down his production company, as well as at least 60 other businesses in the mid-00s. (A group of corrupt consultants colluded with Lynden Scourfield, a former manager at the Reading branch of HBOS, the bank later acquired by Lloyds, to load businesses with unmanageable debts, forcing them into administration, seizing their assets and spending the profits on exotic holidays and parties. They were given lengthy jail sentences in 2017.)

Edmonds flew in from the south of France this morning excited by the prospect of causing chaos at an AGM that will be livestreamed around the world. Over dinner the night before, he sips at a glass of red wine. “I’ve got to keep a clear head for the morning,” he says. “I’ve got some great stuff up my sleeve.” At 70, he is lithe and muscular, the beard and hairdo immaculate. His shirt is undone, 70s he-man style, to reveal a wooden pendant.

My wife doesn’t want to wake up next to someone who looks 70. So I keep in shape. I do something I call snackcercise

When he was voted off I’m A Celebrity, the tabloids called him a hunk. I tell Edmonds I once read he got up at 4am and worked out for four hours. “Oh fucking hell, fuck off!” he exclaims. But he flexes a large bicep and places his arm on the table: “Do you want to arm wrestle me?” I tell him I don’t want to risk losing to a 70-year-old in public. “Exactly,” he beams. “Just like my wife doesn’t want to wake up next to someone who looks 70. So I work hard to keep in shape. I do something I call snackcercise.” This, he explains, involves working your muscles to a point where they can’t go on, then returning to that exercise 48 hours later. Stretching, he thinks, is a time-wasting con invented by personal trainers.

In the three hours I spend with Edmonds, the effervescent and slightly mysterious man I grew up watching on TV is by turns charming, combative, sentimental, angry and playful. He is fond of referring to himself in the third person. He opines on anything and everything, from the BBC (“It will die in my lifetime. Sometimes you just have to accept that an illness is terminal,”), to Nigel Farage (“You might as well ask me what I think about semolina!”), to The Jeremy Kyle Show (“Is this what TV shows are supposed to do now? Use the public as cannon fodder?”), to animal rights (“There are pets dying every day because their owners can’t afford the extortionate vets bills – and they are hassling ITV about the rights of the fucking insects on I’m A Celebrity!”). In 2016, he set up a pet counselling service, calling cats and dogs to offer them words of affirmation and positivity. After counselling a cat called Dana down the line on Jeremy Vine’s Radio 2 show (“Fish Dana, you like fish, don’t you?”) he reportedly received 2,000 applications for help in four hours. By May 2019, however, there was no sign of the service on his website.

For the first 30 years of Edmonds’ career he maintained a studiously safe and middle-of-the-road persona. These days, he is almost as famous for his controversial opinions – about the benefits of pulse electromagnetism or the power of positive thought to tackle cancer (of which more later) – as he is for his presenting talents. Was this maverick Noel Edmonds always there, carefully hidden to preserve his status as Mr Saturday Night? Or did something change in his life to make him turn to all of this stuff?

“I was brought up to be loyal, trustworthy, hardworking and to deliver,” he says. “If you hired Noel Edmonds to do something then, by God, he worked hard at it. When all the other Radio 1 DJs were larking about, I was hard at work preparing the content for my shows. Where are they now?” So he was always competitive? “Extremely,” he says. With whom? “Myself, probably.”

None of which really answers my question. “Maybe I was always more than one person, or even two,” he says. “Maybe being on TV was just my job. People find it hard to get their heads around that.” So work left no room for the rest of his personality? “A couple of times I have shone a light on the other sides of my life, but I have learned to be cautious about that. Because people are only comfortable with the Noel Edmonds they see on television.”

Noel Edmonds photographed at Edinburgh University: ‘This is the happiest period in my life.’ Photograph: Murdo MacLeod/The Guardian

One major turning point was the 2005 collapse of his entertainment company, Unique Group – an umbrella for various production companies that owned the rights to, among other things, Mr Blobby and Telly Addicts. But Edmonds remains dogged in his pursuit of Lloyds, whom he holds responsible, seeking £60m in losses and damages. (Lloyds say they will dispute his claim if it gets to court.) Edmonds complained to the Advertising Standards Authority about the By Your Side Lloyds ad campaign, claiming it was hypocritical. The complaint wasn’t upheld, but the acres of press coverage were damaging. In the past year, Edmonds has widened his campaign to investigate the role he says Lloyds and other banks have played in the closure of 100,000 businesses since the financial crisis, ultimately bringing about a decade of austerity. His YouTube channel Lloyds Victims has 1.8m subscribers, and last year he set up an online radio station, Positively Noel, inviting Lloyds staffers to blow the whistle in breaks between pertinent tracks such as Kate Bush and Peter Gabriel’s Don’t Give Up and LunchMoney Lewis’ Bills.

At around the same time his business collapsed, Edmonds’ marriage to his second wife, Helen Soby, with whom he had four daughters, came to an end (he has since remarried, to Liz Davies, who worked as a makeup artist on Deal Or No Deal). “It was my rock bottom,” he tells me. “Let’s be 100% clear about this: I tried to kill myself on January 18, 2005.”

It wasn’t until 2017, 12 years later, that he spoke publicly of his suicide attempt. “I was as guilty as most people of thinking that anyone who wanted to take their own life was selfish and ridiculous. But you really can’t judge anyone until you’ve been in that space,” he says. After receiving treatment at the Priory hospital in Bristol, he slowly began to rebuild his life.

It was around the same time that Edmonds discovered the idea of cosmic ordering, whereby he would write a list of requests to the universe and wait for them to come about. “Of course it doesn’t always work,” he admits. “But I actually think you can lead a happier life if you think, ‘I wanted that to happen, I prayed for that to happen and if it didn’t perhaps I have to accept that it just wasn’t supposed to happen.’ You don’t just stop believing in something because it doesn’t always work.”

On Deal Or No Deal, for which he was nominated for a Bafta. Photograph: ITV/REX/Shutterstock

Just months after his suicide attempt, Edmonds became the face of Deal Or No Deal, a daytime game show with a baffling set of rules: a contestant selected identical boxes from a row of 22, each of which contained a different sum of money (the maximum being £250,000). An anonymous “banker” would communicate with the contestant by phone via Edmonds, making real-money offers to buy the boxes. It was, effectively, a simple guessing game – but Edmonds elevated it into drama so compelling that AA Gill described it as “like putting heroin in your remote control”. Other hosts might have been funny or lightly mocked the format, but Edmonds takes everything he does deeply seriously. Deal Or No Deal became one of Channel 4’s most popular shows and Edmonds was nominated for a Bafta; it ran for a decade, before coming to an end in 2016.

With Noel’s House Party sidekick Mr Blobby. Photograph: Alamy

His campaign against Lloyds is partly a way of making a positive from a negative, but it must be stressful. Is he happy? “This is the happiest period in my life,” he says. “There’s a lot of stuff going on that I never thought Noel Edmonds would get involved with. I am going to ensure that the small group of UK bankers that brought 12 years of austerity and deprivation upon the British people will go to prison. And if that is my legacy, then I would prefer it to being Mr Blobby’s friend.”

***

The only child of two teachers, Lydia and Dudley (Edmonds refers to them by their Christian names), he spent his childhood in Ilford, east London, and then the suburbs of Essex. It was a lower-middle-class upbringing, and his parents made sacrifices to send him to Brentwood, the public school, where Douglas Adams and Griff Rhys Jones were contemporaries.

His early career was driven largely by a desire to impress his parents. “When I was invited on Desert Island Discs by Roy Plomley [in 1978] my dad finally started to think that I had a proper job,” he says. After sitting his A-levels, he had turned down a place at Surrey University. “When I told my dad I was going to be a disc jockey in Luxembourg, I must have broken his heart. But he forgave me and just said, ‘OK, go and be the best disc jockey there is.’” Edmonds was offered a job as a newsreader at Radio Luxembourg in 1968, after sending the offshore station tapes of himself. “You cannot imagine how exciting it was to be broadcasting pop music in the 60s,” he says. “The BBC had been giving us just a couple of hours a week. Then suddenly these new pirate stations were playing it round the clock – it felt like we were in America.”

In 1969, aged 20, he became the youngest disc jockey Radio 1 had ever hired (a record that stood until 1999). Within a few years he was hosting the breakfast show and attracting over 10m daily listeners. His hero was Kenny Everett, whom he eventually replaced on Saturday mornings. “I could never be as funny as Kenny, who was a genius,” he says. “But I aspired to create the same amount of original content as him. That’s what always drives me: creating stuff that will entertain people. And I put the hours in.”

DJing in 1970. In 1969, aged 20, he became the youngest disc jockey Radio 1 had ever hired. Photograph: Wesley/Getty Images

Edmonds’ shows were rich in the sort of segments that were rare at the time: prerecorded comic characters, prank phone calls and stunts. Was it a happy time? “Yes, it was fantastic – you’re in your early 20s, all by yourself in the studio, talking to 14m people. I thought, if I come off air and I’ve amused myself, then maybe it’s worked.”

On Swap Shop, Edmonds broke the mould of patronising children’s TV by presiding over an anarchic show in a T-shirt and long hair, freewheeling without a script or earpiece. On House Party, his Gotcha Oscars set the bar for celebrity pranking, a format that has been mimicked ever since (not least, and by their own admission, by Ant and Dec). House Party’s NTV feature turned the cameras on viewers watching the show in their front rooms long before Gogglebox. Even if you didn’t care for Edmonds, his ideas transcended his personality and drew audiences of millions.

***

Edmonds says he remembers watching The Val Doonican Show with Lydia and Dudley at home in Essex, and telling them he was going to be a TV presenter. What made him so sure? “I heard the other disc jockeys on Radio Caroline, and saw the other presenters on TV, and simply thought, ‘I could do that,’” he says. Was he particularly funny or outgoing at school? “No, never. But I was never going to fit into a 1,000-boy school that was designed to just train people up for university. I’ve always wanted to be different. I’ve always had this huge positive energy around me.”

He has claimed in previous interviews that his parents, both now dead, accompany him in the form of melon-sized orbs wherever he goes. They certainly loom large in his conversation. “We formed a triangle, the three of us,” he tells me. “The triangle is a very important shape. But then the triangle was broken. And nobody sympathises with an orphan in their 60s.”

Maybe it is his desire to be taken seriously that has inspired Edmonds to investigate worlds less frivolous than Crinkley Bottom. In recent years his proclamations on electromagnetic energy (he has claimed it helped with his prostate cancer), cosmic ordering, and population control have generated both controversy and ridicule. But he insists that his comments have been taken out of context, and that his beliefs are rooted in research. He tells me he lives by a rule called FKO, which stands for facts, knowledge, opinion. “First you get the facts and that gives you the knowledge to form an opinion,” he says. “I came up with the idea of FKO when people started calling me barmy.”

In 2016, Edmonds tweeted cancer patient Vaun Norman to ask him whether his illness might have been caused by negative thinking. Were people not justified in calling that, at the very least, “barmy”?

Edmonds with his wife Liz Davies, who worked as a makeup artist on Deal Or No Deal. Photograph: Rocky/WENN.com

“I was trying to generate curiosity,” he says. “The starting point was me saying that pulsed electromagnetism had helped me tackle – not cure – my cancer. Wouldn’t you think that, in a balanced media environment, people might think: ‘That’s interesting, let’s have a dip into that?’”

Edmonds was then invited on to This Morning to explain his comments: he told a sceptical Phillip Schofield and Holly Willoughby that he had bought a £2,315 device called an EMPpad which helped “tackle” cancer; he later explained it worked by “recalibrating all the blood cells and readjusting the electromagnetism in your body”. In a statement, EMPpad Ltd, manufacturers of the device, strongly distanced themselves from this claim.

Last year, Victoria Derbyshire (who is in remission from breast cancer) confronted Edmonds about these claims on her BBC show. He later apologised to Norman, but remains unrepentant about the benefits of pulsed electromagnetism. “The idea that I said, ‘I have a cure for cancer’ – I mean, fuck off! If that were true I’d own the whole world. All I said was: ‘D’you know what? This helped me.’ I was very disappointed in Victoria, as a fellow cancer sufferer, that she wasn’t curious. Pulse Electro Magnetism may have been able to help her as well. But instead she wanted to go back to an old Twitter row. It was cheap television.”

A couple of hours into our conversation, Edmonds says he wants to do an experiment on me. He asks me to stand up, place my arms by my side and resist as he tries to pull my right arm upwards. I feel like a contestant on House Party. As he pulls, he says loudly: “Resist. Resist. Resist.” Other diners are looking our way. I successfully resist and Edmonds says, “Good.” Then he fetches his mobile phone, tells me to hold it in my left hand, before grabbing my right arm and doing the whole “Resist. Resist. Resist” routine again. Only this time I find that I cannot: he pulls my arm up easily.

Edmonds smiles in satisfaction. “And people say that I’m crazy because I believe in the human body’s energy system,” he says. “All I did was introduce a negative energy into your system [the phone] – but Noel Edmonds is fucking stupid and crazy!” For a moment, anger flashes in his eyes. Then he switches into faux-zany, beaming at me intensely and saying: “Do you know why I am stupid? Because I tried to share it with stupid people. Isn’t it fun?”

Brexit is the best example of how the regime needed to control the population by creating a distraction

I ask him to explain exactly what he thinks just happened to my arm. “No, go off and learn,” he says. “Because Noel Edmonds doesn’t know all the answers – all he’s done is go off, gather facts, acquire knowledge and he’s formed an opinion.”

It’s getting late but Edmonds is becoming more energised. “I am on one now,” he admits. What’s his take on Brexit? “Brexit is the best example of how the regime needed to control the population by creating a distraction,” he says. “It was, without a shadow of a doubt, created by the political elite – who, of course, are not the people we vote for, but the ones who really run the country. So for three years we are talking about this complete and absolute nonsense and not the real issues facing us.”

Who are these people running the country? “The people who are always there, whoever we vote for: the civil servants and bureaucrats.”

And what are the real issues facing us? “Well, are you happy with the NHS? Are you happy with the schools? Are you happy with the roads or the high-speed train going to Birmingham that’s 20 minutes quicker? When 14m people in Britain are living at or below the poverty line?”

In the past he has been quoted as saying that the country is full and can’t afford to allow any more people in. He says that he has no party political allegiances, is no fan of Nigel Farage and that his comments had nothing to do with immigration. Can he clarify his position? He asks me how many people I think are living in the UK. I say I think it’s around 65m (the current government estimate is 66.87m).

“No, it’s not,” he chuckles, almost sympathetically. “Why would you ever believe a number that has been produced by the people who said we were giving the EU £350m a week? It’s a fiction. It’s actually at least 75m.”

I ask him where he gets his information from. “There is a very simple way of working out for yourself what the real population of this country is,” he says. “It’s the three ‘F’s’ – food, faeces and farewells. Food is very tightly regulated because it has to be, for obvious reasons. Faeces is the same. We know how much shit and piss is going through the system. And as for farewells – we have a pretty good idea how many people are buried or cremated each year.” It doesn’t quite explain how he has managed to accurately gauge the UK population, but this is classic Edmonds: creating a diversion, inventing an acronym and packaging it up in unswerving conviction.

By now I am tired and confused, lost in the blizzard of Edmonds’ rapid-fire theories. Like the consummate TV host he is, he has subtly turned the tables and started to fire questions back at me.

Edmonds: How big is the food warehouse for the UK in the event that our country has a problem with food? How long can we survive if there is a blockade?

Me: I don’t know.

Edmonds: Tell me!

Me: I’ve no idea.

Edmonds: You can’t say that. How old are you?

Me: 44. Do you know what our food reserves are?

Edmonds: Yes.

Me: How?

Edmonds: Because! (banging table) Facts! Knowledge! Opinion!

The next morning Noel breezes into the Lloyds AGM. When eventually handed the microphone, he asks the aloof and clearly exasperated bank chairman, Lord Blackwell, if he is being fed his lines by lawyers via an earpiece, before demanding whether he is aware of the number of police investigations currently facing Lloyds (he isn’t). It is unlikely that Edmonds is going to give up his fight. His doggedness is a problem for Lloyds, as is his relentless eccentricity – which only serves to amplify his campaign.

It is easy to laugh at Noel Edmonds; people do it all the time. “I know I confuse people – I’m aware of how I am perceived,” he says. But he doesn’t care enough to stop. When challenged about his outlandish theories, Edmonds reacts with a mixture of hostility, exasperation and amusement. Despite all this, I like him. He is spiky, yes, but oddly charming with it. I don’t believe in much of what he says, but I believe that he does, and that it probably helps him. So why wouldn’t he share it?

And that, in the end, is his secret. Edmonds has a cast-iron conviction in himself, in his ideas and in his belief that his audience will buy in to what he is saying. He could change the world. He could bring down a bank. It’s already made him the longest-standing star in the history of British television. Blimey.

• Noel Edmonds will be on a live tour of UK cinemas in August presenting Samir Mehanovic’s documentary Spank The Banker

If you would like a comment to be considered for inclusion on Weekend magazine’s letters page in print, please email weekend@theguardian.com, including your name and address (not for publication).