He used to walk there in split trainers and a wet sock to earn less than twenty pounds - but TV host Paddy McGuinness has returned to where he first started work in style driving a HGV truck. On BBC's Inside the Factory tonight, Paddy heads to Warburtons bread factory in Bolton where he had his first £17.50-a-week job as a 16-year-old.
But because it was a Saturday job, the giant machines he cleaned weren’t running, so after delivering flour in the truck he sees them in action for the first time. Looking back, honest Paddy said: "It's very rare you love your job when you're 16. You're doing it for money, aren't you? You know. So luckily that job, all the lads who worked there at the time were all similar ages, so that was a good part of it, because you'd have a laugh and you'd talk about football or whatever. It was a Saturday job, cleaning machines in winter. I walked there in the morning, at six in the morning. It were always raining, pitch black, freezing. I had a hole in me trainer where my sock would hang out. I would clean all day, and then I walk back in the dark and the rain. So it was one of them jobs. I just like, hated it. I had mates who carried on working there, and then years later, obviously I've now gone back, and I forgot actually what it's like as a place. It was so lovely to go around it and see a different side of it, really, and see people who work there. I drove into the factory in a HGV and the only reason I got my licence for that is doing it through hosting Top Gear so it shows where life's twists and turns can take you."
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BBC/Voltage TV/Michael Rees)Head of Flour, Stuart Jones tells him that they receive three tanker loads of flour each day, containing a total of 90 tonnes – enough to make 170,000 loaves of bread! The site makes 1.4 million loaves of bread every week. Paddy added: "It was absolutely full of people and buzzing with laughter and chat. And then the main thing is, which I never got when I worked, was the smell of the bread, because I was in the ovens. And you imagine, you know, thousands of loaves being baked.
"Everyone loves the smell of baked bread. So it was like a tsunami of, like, lovely baked smells. So that's the biggest thing, really, for me, just walking around and going, Oh God, it just smells gorgeous."
Paddy says he would give his late mum some of his £17.50 wages but in 1989 that still left him plenty of spare cash.
He joked: "It was a lovely feeling knowing you had a tenner. A tenner back then in Bolton with me and me mates, I was like f**king Jeff Bezos, you know! So that always gave me my work ethic cos I liked earning money.
"You asked what did I buy, at the age it was probably a pair of Joe Bloggs jeans or saving up for a good T-shirt. That is what it was like back in the day."
He left the job after around a year and then was stacking shelves in a supermarket until he later became a TV and comedy star when he teamed up with close pal Peter Kay on shows like Phoenix Nights.
Paddy is co-parenting his three children, twins Penelope and Leo, eleven, and Felicity, eight, who all have autism.with former Christine after they separated in 2022.
Asked what would be the perfect ingredients for a great 2025 would be for him, Paddy said: "I think as you get older, it sounds a bit schmaltzy, but it's true; you realise more it's about health and happiness I think. If we've all got a bit of that, you know, that's pretty much job done.
"Everything else hopefully comes in after it. I just hope everyone around me, all my friends and my family just stay as healthy and as happy as possible.
"My friends and family are still in Bolton and I was there at Christmas. It's 40 minutes in the car so I am still there every other week. Where we are now the kids love it and we have got them settled into a school and it's a nice routine I have got."
Paddy's programme also reveals a host of amazing facts about Warburtons bread and the Bolton factory. Unbeatable Quality Manager, Rachel Bacon tells Paddy that the key to making the best white bread is air bubbles; inside each slice there are 13,000 bubbles, all counted by computer!
To make the dough, a mixer combines the flour with water and brine, along with yeast and a special ingredient called ‘improver’, which will help with the structure of the dough. After mixing for three minutes, the dough is tipped out and chopped into 341 separate pieces, each one weighing 920 grams. Every one of these mounds of dough will go on to make a loaf.
After being left in a prover, two hours and forty minutes into production, the tins head into the 32 metre-long oven.
Paddy has taken over Inside The Factory hosting duties from Gregg Wallace, but actually landed the job some time ago and has been filming it now for a long time.
He said: "I've been doing it now for about a year. I host a show called Tempting Fortune for Channel 4 and the guy who's production company makes that series also makes Inside The Factory.
"At first I said no, nothing to do with the show or anything else. I said, Look, I'm a kind of person when I'm doing anything, I like a little bit of licence to ad lib and different things, and I just wasn't sure how they did the programme.
"We carried on talking and then I went to a factory near me, this wasn't televised or anything, just to have a look at how they did things and I really enjoyed it.
"It has been one of those shows that whenever it's on, even if I've missed the first 10 minutes, I'll sit down and watch it, because it's always interesting to me."
* The new series of Inside The Factory continues on BBC1 tonight(Tuesday) at 8pm and the series will also be available to watch on BBC iPlayer.
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