Mixed martial arts (MMA) is apparently one of the world’s fastest-growing sports . A melange of full-contact disciplines from all over the globe, it involves punching, kicking, grappling and ground-fighting, with seemingly very few rules. Imagine a barefoot street brawl and you’re almost there.
I had to look all this up, because the new BBC Three docuseries Paddy and Molly: Show No Mersey assumed prior knowledge. With tennis or football, you might get away with that, but not with a sport only invented 30 years ago. Perhaps regular BBC Three viewers are more au fait with it.
Paddy “The Baddy” Pimblett and “Meatball” Molly McCann, “proud scousers and best mates”, are a pair of Britain’s top MMA fighters. The series follows them as Pimblett returns to the “cage” (rather like a very large, non-bouncy trampoline) following a serious ankle injury. McCann was, meanwhile, attempting a comeback after two successive defeats nearly led to her retirement from this brutal-looking sport.
Indeed, anyone who caught last week’s cautionary ITV documentary Code Blue: One-Punch Killers might be alarmed at the unbridled ferocity of the fist blows. Shocking but mercifully brief inserts showed some of the injuries sustained by fighters, from gouged eyes to snapped ankles. The opening episode built up to Pimblett’s fight in Las Vegas against an American MMA veteran, Tony Ferguson, and watching the Liverpudlian sweat and self-starve himself down to the required weight, I did.