Burdened by an excess of living brain cells? Meet Mr. Blobby!

08.24.2013
10:57 am
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Pop Culture
Television
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Mr. Blobby

Mr. Blobby

In a column in late 1943, George Orwell vented a bit about anti-British sentiment in the U.S.:

We ought to face the fact that large numbers of Americans are brought up to dislike and despise us. ... The typical Englishman is represented as a chinless ass with a title, a monocle and a habit of saying “Haw, haw.” This legend is believed in by relatively responsible Americans, for example by the veteran novelist Theodore Dreiser, who remarks in a public speech that “the British are horse-riding aristocratic snobs.” (Forty-six million horse-riding snobs!)

Orwell was quite right, of course, there is a marked tendency for Americans to think of the English as erudite, upper-crust people with accents you could sharpen diamonds on.

Nothing, but nothing, will disabuse you of that tendency (should you have it) more quickly and more thoroughly than ten seconds’ exposure to an astonishing character named Mr. Blobby, a British media sensation of the early to mid-1990s.

Mr. Blobby started as a recurring prank on a Saturday night TV show called Noel’s House Party—his pranks are in the tradition of Candid Camera, but in truth Mr. Blobby was also an obvious precursor to the shenanigans of Sasha Baron Cohen (who, you’ll recall, is also British). The idea was that Mr. Blobby would be inserted into this or that professional context on the pretense of filming a children’s TV show, but would then merely be excruciatingly clumsy, knock all manner of objects down to the floor, fall over, and incessantly intone the single word that existed in his vocabulary, which (of course) was “blobby.”

I grope for an American analogy—if Barney the Dinosaur worked for Howard Stern? If Triumph the Insult Dog made nothing but farting noises? Perhaps someone else can hit upon just the right equation here.

Lest you suspect that I’m abusing the term “media sensation” above, note that in the winter of 1993-94, the entity/corporation known as Mr. Blobby released a song, predictably entitled “Mr. Blobby,” that hit #1 on the U.K. charts for three weeks—additionally, it became the first song in more than twenty years to be bumped from the #1 slot and then secure it again.

Tom Ewing, in his (extremely good) “Popular” blog covering every #1 hit in the U.K. since 1952, explained the success of the “Mr. Blobby” single thus:

[The single is] just slapstick, corporate Dada, highly merchandised nonsense. It’s true that Blobby struck an awful lot of nerves – he was a lodestone for a wider debate about “dumbing down,” … a lurid, shambling “why we can’t have nice things” symbol for a vaguer sense of cultural decline.

But he was also a man in a rubber suit who fell over a lot. And this is his single, coming on like a megamix of previous novelties – the tinny Casio rush of Bombalurina, a chorus of kids a la St Winifreds, three-line-whip jollity (not quite as gritted-teeth as The Stonk), and plenty of parping and farting because, er, Britain.

One thing about Mr. Blobby though—as much as I hate to admit it, he is pretty funny. For the most part Mr. Blobby positively makes me itch, but the video’s two explicit spoofs feature extremely well-chosen targets that had elevated sleek, pompous popcraft over any ordinary human emotion (Robert Palmer’s “Addicted to Love” and Genesis’ “We Can’t Dance”) at the end of both of which Mr. Blobby falls down all over everything. Ha! And there’s another bit I like where he kicks some footballer in the shin for no reason. So even if he is repulsive and sub-moronic, there’s something in him that appeals to virtually all of us.

Mr. Blobby is still around, too: He has a Facebook feed and a Twitter presence. He lives on in the well-publicized prank, perpetrated just a few months ago, in which, inspired by Mr. Blobby, an Essex man painted his brother’s house bright pink with yellow spots without bothering to inform him. Mr. Blobby’s Twitter account evinces some kind of minimalist genius, in that he’s permitted to use but a single word, as for instance: