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It’s best of British, really,” says Scott of his collection – he also owns props from reality competition Britain’s Got Talent. Scott is seeking funding for his own museum, but in the meantime says: “We’re probably going to take the collection out on the road and speak about it to Women’s Institutes and Lions clubs.” Kerryn explains the fish looked so comical when it was first caught due to the sharp change in pressure from the deep sea to surface level. With a kilometre of ocean water squeezing the blobfish at 100 times the pressure we experience on the surface, there’s no need for a hard skeleton or scales to hold his body together – the sheer force of the water holds the blobfishes’ body in that perfect tadpole shape as they bob along the seafloor.
The most helpful person to verify our Blobby tally would be Edmonds. Is he available to comment from New Zealand? Kerryn’s image has been repurposed by the internet in thousands of cruel and creative ways. Mr Blobby birthed the ‘Go Home Evolution, You’re Drunk’ meme. He was voted the world’s ugliest animal in 2013 and became the poster child for the UK’s Ugly Animal Preservation Society. He’s been printed on phone cases, t-shirts, doonas and tote bags. In 2019 Kim Kardashian’s eldest child, North West, sprang from a pink hummer sporting fluffy Mr Blobby slippers. Mr Blobby was a success –and people wanted more of him. Paul Pascoe was Edmonds’ solicitor from the late 80s and eventually became his business partner at his entertainment company Unique (Pascoe is company director, Edmonds is no longer involved). He remembers the moment Edmonds realised Blobby was a hit: “Noel said to me: ‘Bobby is going to be huge.’” When he asked why, Edmonds replied: “‘We get three post bags of mail each week and 70-80 percent of the postbag is to do with Blobby’,” says Pascoe.Still, Killerby played Mr Blobby for around 20 years. With him in the suit, Blobby’s role expanded way beyond “Gotchas”. “You could do anything with him,” says Leggo. One of the wildest moments he remembers was when they armed Blobby with a catapult. “It was like an old medieval weapon of war, and he would fire sponge cakes into the audience,” he says. “They loved it! They wanted to sit in the seats where they’d get zonked by Blobby with cream and jam cake.” He’ll be preserved forever like this,” she says. “He’ll be compared and contrasted with new specimens for years to come. We’ve got fish here from the 1800s – this is why we have museums.” This data deficiency makes it difficult to establish the conservation status of blobfish, too. People often assume them to be endangered – an unsubstantiated claim perhaps driven by a satirical ‘Save the Blobfish’ advertising challenge on The Gruen Transfer in 2010 – but the truth is we just don’t know. Leggo says Blobby was a “runaway success”, even though not everyone liked this slightly nightmarish-looking character. “He was completely Marmite – people loved him or hated him, but you couldn’t escape him. It was impossible to not have an opinion about him,” he says.
Denson, unfortunately, won’t be playing Mr Blobby in the panto. Instead, he’ll be running a “Blobby school” with some of the cast. “On at least one performance, Mr Blobby will be played by me, because I’m not turning that opportunity down,” says Gordon-Wilson. I can’t remember what triggered it at all,” Balcombe says of his 25-year hobby. “Basically, I had some money to spend, and nostalgia comes into this hugely.” Balcombe never hid behind his sofa when watching Doctor Who, but remembers cuddling up with his mum and dad when the Daleks were on screen. It's hard to overstate the success of Noel’s House Party. At the time, Saturday night TV was a big deal. People would stay in to watch the show. As Leggo says, it was “appointment-to-view television”. At its peak, it drew in 15 million viewers. Alan Yentob, BBC One controller at the time, described it as “the most important show on the BBC”. I rang a trusted agent, who said: ‘I can only think of one person’ – Barry Killerby, a classically trained Shakespearean actor,” says Leggo. “He brought such fantastic physical comedy to what was essentially a big pink rubber blob.” What does the future hold for Mr Blobby? “I don’t think he’ll achieve the craziness he did in the past, but I do think that over the next couple of years, he will become a celebrity again,” says Pascoe. He casually floats what might be the maddest Blobby idea yet: “What about Mr Blobby and Love Island? I mean, anything is possible.”
I was a fan as a kid, but it wasn't like I’d been trying to become Mr Blobby for my entire life, it just fell into my lap,” says Denson. “Never in a million years would I have thought this would happen.” The smell inside the suit was pretty overwhelming, too. “It had been in storage for a while and it had its own aroma... that old, musty smell.” Ichthyology Research Assistant at the the Australian Museum Research Institute Dr Kerryn Parkinson snapped the notorious portrait of the blobfish in 2003 aboard the NORFANZ cruise, a research expedition that trawled deep sea habitats between Australia and New Zealand to discover more about what lurks in our seas beyond the reach of sunlight. (Image credit: Kerryn Parkinson/NORFANZ The first Blobby that Scott bought stands in his hallway ready to great guests with its unblinking lash-lined eyes. His second Blobby – bought years later from a BBC employee – is kept in storage.
Stowe helped sell ’Allo ’Allo!’s Fallen Madonna after a couple who bought it at a school charity auction in the 90s decided it was time to let it go. “It sold to a gentleman who lives in France, very close to where the series was set,” Stowe says. “He collects artwork and he’s got it on his wall alongside some of the world’s most famous artists. There’s genuine pieces of art worth hundreds of thousands of pounds and right in the middle is this prop from a BBC sitcom.” Awaiting our rendezvous at the Australian Museum, suspended elegantly in a jar of preservation fluid the shade of date-night Riesling. Where is Mr Blobby now? In a jar of preservation fluid the shade of date-night Riesling. (Image credit: Dean Sewell) Mr Blobby’s glow–up His demand has waxed and waned alongside Edmonds’ fame (today’s Guardian booking is only his second since Covid). “There’s more mileage in Alan Sugar, but there’s more Sugars about,” he says. “People assumed it was me in the Blobby costume at first,” but Gold wasn’t involved in House Party. He doubts any of the Blobbys he has met (usually at corporate events) have been official. And, unlike the actual Edmonds, he can’t fly a helicopter. “I’ve been in one twice and I thought I was going to fall out.” I’d like to know if it was a male or a female,” says Kerryn, looking down at, possibly, Mrs Blobby. “And I’d love to know how old. This guy could be 50 years old; we just don’t know.” We just thought it was funny,” remembers Kerryn. “You gotta remember we’d been working 12–14 hour days, every day, for several weeks. So some unexpected things seem incredibly funny in those circumstances.
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The expedition yielded all manner of fascinating animals, including more than 100 species new to science. But the specimen dubbed ‘Mr Blobby’ became the expedition’s viral star. But there’s a reason I haven’t stood him up. This creature – a blobfish dredged up from kilometre-deep waters off the north-west coast of New Zealand – is perhaps the world’s most famous fish specimen. At least there’s some good news. When Blobby appeared in panto in Peter Pan in Milton Keynes in 2021 (played by a variety of actors, but not Killerby), Unique made two new costumes, which Pascoe confirms they still own, along with a “battered, old” original Blobby. We know they produce eggs and we think they guard their nests,” says Kerryn. “We now know they’re an ambush predator.” Watching the video now, it’s hard to believe it’s real. Blobby gets given a sponge bath, smashes up a drum kit and has Jeremy Clarkson as his chauffeur. “When the Blobby single was released, I think that’s when people who didn’t already hate me for creating Blobby filled the rest of my wax doll with pins,” says Leggo.
Kerryn hopes that Mr Blobby could serve as a key specimen for deep sea ichthyology researchers in the future, alongside the 500,000 other specimens preserved by the museum’s fish collection, the largest in the Southern Hemisphere. I can appreciate why Mr Blobby doesn’t do more than wave his arms about: there’s not much more you can do. At least it’s not too hot: my inflatable version (with an inbuilt fan) is more like walking around in my own personal tent. Maybe I’ll take it to Glastonbury. At first, Denson just played Mr Blobby on YouTube. His first public appearance was at a “Revenge of the 90s” club night in Bristol. But things stepped up a gear when a request came in for Alan Carr: Chatty Man. “Someone said: ‘Well, you do it now, don’t you? Because you’ve got the costume’. I was just slowly nodding,” says Denson. No one on the tube seems to understand the motto: “If you see something unusual, report it to staff …” But, after squishing through the barriers at Piccadilly Circus, I’m a bona fide celebrity. Buses toot, tourists pose, small children look terrified and motorists yell: “Blobby!” out of their windows.For now, Mr Blobby is emblematic of the tantalising mystery of the deep sea, the crucial work of museums, and the importance of conservation for all creatures great, small and disturbingly Trump-like. He’s been on display in the museum to the horror and delight of school kids. The museum even had a rubber replica of Mr Blobby created so they’d have something to poke. It was instantly recognisable as a type of sculpin. These guys have a tadpole-shaped body. Their skin is what we would call ‘naked’; there’s no scales and very few spiny protrusions. The area around Australia and New Zealand provides the perfect sort of conditions for this family.” Leggo describes Mr Blobby as a “loveable anarchist” and maybe, given the last year and a half, that’s what we need right now. I ask Gordon-Wilson, why Mr Blobby and why now? “I think right now, while people are in a weird place, having a bit of nostalgia is just right,” he says. “It reminds us of a simpler time, when all we had to worry about was Noel Edmonds.”
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