BOLTON comic Paddy McGuinness may be missing out on walking down the famous cobbles, but he is making up for it by treading on a few toes in his Coronation Street cameo.

The Take Me Out host plays Dougie Ryan, a "poor man's Bear Grylls" and know-it-all who takes over a camping holiday featuring soap favourites including Tyrone, Kirk and Fiz, during a six-episode special.

He rubs the lads up the wrong way, but ends up becoming a bit of a heartthrob with some of the girls.

Paddy said: "Dougie is like a poor man's Bear Grylls. So where Tyrone's a mechanic and quite hands on, when he comes out to the countryside he's not got a clue how to build a tent. Dougie comes along and he's sort of, 'You should stand back son.' He's one of those.

"Slowly throughout all the episodes, you see a progression where Tyrone just gets more and more worn down by him. By the end, he's just like a shell, and Dougie just sort of oversees everything. He's just one of them. It's been really, really good to do and get my teeth into.

"Dougie has a conflict with Tyrone, then he has a conflict with Beth, who's Craig's mum, and he has a bit of a to-do with Chesney as well. In fact, he falls out with everyone but on different degrees."

Despite his character's alpha-male tendencies, Paddy believes that Dougie will be liked by fans of the show.

He said: "I think viewers will like him. It's just the characters he's interacting with don't like him, because of how he takes control of them. Beth, Fiz and Sinead all quite fancy him. So when he's building stuff, they're like, 'Ooh, Dougie's quite fit isn't he?' And the lads are like, 'If you like that kind of thing.' I don't think viewers will look at him as one of those characters who they can't stand. I think they'll warm to him, but it's just the characters don't.

"His opening line when they're pitching a tent is him striding in saying, 'stand back everyone.' They don't have a clue who he is – he just takes over. And he gets worse and worse and worse throughout the episodes."

Paddy has revealed that a part on Coronation Street has always been on his agenda.

He said: "I've always wanted to do Corrie so when they came to me with the character of Dougie I thought I could really do something with the character.

"When the scripts came through, it's the first time I've ever got one where I thought, 'I don't really have to change anything.' They were really funny. And I'm lucky that the characters I'm doing it with as well are funny characters; Tyrone, Kirk and Fiz and all these lot.

"I think Coronation Street has always had a rich vein of comedy running through it, throughout the years. Some of the stuff we're doing in these six episodes is so outlandish, you probably wouldn't be able to get away with it on the street. So I quite like being out of it, it's like our own little spin-off."

The six-part special takes the cast away from the famous street and into the woods, where they bump into Dougie and his 16-year-old daughter Caitlin.

Paddy said: "Dougie goes on camping trips, two or three times a year with his daughter Caitlin. You see the arc of the story where his daughter's obviously 16 now and she's getting to the stage where she's getting a bit sick of going with her dad camping, but he still loves it. He doesn't want to lose that with her. But then, she meets Craig and a bit of something forms there, which Dougie's kind of like, 'what's going on here type of thing.' He doesn't want to lose his daughter. It's just lovely, a really nice story to play."

Watch Paddy on Coronation Street from Monday, August 17 at 7.30pm on ITV.