6. Mr Blobby - "Mr Blobby"

Or, "Was the monoculture actually good?"

I was recently invited to be a guest on a podcast (the episode isn’t out yet—I’ll be shouting it from the rooftops once it is). At one point during the recording, I asked, “Do you ever kind of miss the monoculture?” to which one of the co-hosts just sighed wistfully and replied, “All the time, man. All the time.”

I think it’s my most elder-millennial, rose-tinted-glasses, ultra-nostalgic viewpoint: I think the monoculture was a good thing and I miss it. I spend as much time on Netflix and Spotify as the next person, but decision fatigue is real and I’m not sure our primitive brains were meant to have this much choice. Sure, sometimes we all apparently come together and watch Squid Game, but we’re doing it at different times so we’re constantly aware of spoilers and there aren’t those morning-after conversations following a big twist in an episode. Plus, I miss radio listening being much more common and when a single song could be something that everybody knew. Fundamentally, I also suspect people actually quite like being told what to watch, what to listen to, what to like, and what to do.

However, I know all of this is kind of nonsense and makes me sound roughly a hundred years old, and I also knew I wouldn’t go back even if I had the choice. For one thing, the monoculture means things like this.

Good Lord, where to begin?

For the uninitiated (non-Brits and anybody under the age of 30), this is Mr Blobby. The one on the right of the picture, that is. The one with the beard is former BBC Radio 1 DJ and general annoyance Noel Edmonds. Mr Blobby was the… how do you describe him? Star? Enfant terrible? Everyman? Beating heart? Puckish irritant? Anyway, he was part of a TV show called Noel’s House Party that went out on Saturday nights on BBC One between 1991 and 1999.

Noel’s House Party featured games, stunts, pranks, celebrities and was generally a 1990s update of the family-friendly variety tradition. Mr Blobby would make cameos where he’d career around clumsily and pratfall his way through whatever was going on. None of his facial features moved, he had a voice that was somewhere on the spectrum between demonic and chipmunk, and he could only say one word: “Blobby.” He was equal parts blancmange and chaos.

Oh, have I mentioned this show was routinely watched by eighteen million people?!

Anyway, when you’ve commandeered the monoculture with a primetime TV show, the next natural step—in 1993, anyway—was to launch a bid for Christmas Number 1. A successful bid.

Some of the lyrics are an interesting choice, given it’s a children’s novelty song:

• “Mr Blobby, your influence will spread throughout the land.”

• “His philosophy of life will steer him through.”

• “No chance too slim, no fate too grim.”

Anyway, I do actually kind of miss things like this being part of the public consciousness due to the monoculture. Saturday night television and the charts don’t have the same lustre and gravitational pull as they used to, and there’s something kind of sad about that, in my mind.

As for the song itself, despite finding the character kind of annoying, I loved it. Of course I did; I was seven. I was exactly who the song was for. I was delighted that it beat Take That to Christmas Number One.

I have a clear memory relating to this song from a primary school Christmas disco. The kind of event where kids hopped up on fizzy drinks flail around to the chart hits of the day. Our school discos used to take requests and dedications, and when the DJ announced the next song was dedicated to “Joe and Tania”, Tania (a girl in my class who I’d barely spoken to, from memory) ran out of the hall in tears. Obviously this wasn’t the best boost to my confidence but by the end of the evening, the DJ played “Mr Blobby” twice in a row, and I was high on life and E-numbers, congaing around the dancefloor with everyone.

Do seven year olds get these experiences anymore? I don’t know. But novelty songs, artificially-coloured drinks and the first, tentative (and incredibly unsuccessful) steps into the world of dating are what that age should be about.

Thanks, Mr Blobby.

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What didn’t get to Number 1 because of this song?

Here is where I normally talk about the songs that stalled at Number 2 while the track in question was top of the charts, but everything that hit Number 2 in Mr Blobby’s chart-topping run eventually got to Number 1. Instead, here are some of the other songs in the Top 40 on Christmas Day 1993.

• East 17 - “It’s Alright”

Some nice foreshadowing here, as the group would be Number 1 at Christmas the following year.

• Peabo Bryson and Regina Belle - “A Whole New World (Aladdin’s Theme)”

In case you’re wondering what else was capturing the imagination of seven year olds back in 1993.

• Saint Etienne - “I Was Born on Christmas Day”

This is one of the greatest ever Christmas songs and I shall not hear a word said about it.