At a Tesco in Watford, Mr Blobby bears down on shoppers at speed.
He has just destroyed the cake the supermarket has baked to celebrate its 100th anniversary and now he wants to force-feed it to people doing their big shop. His plastic eyes are boggling wildly. Nobody knows what he will do next.
The man inside the Blobby suit is Paul Denson. To take form, he puts on the legs of his Blobby suit first and does stretches to warm up the thick latex. (Nobody sees Blobby at this stage. One iron law of the character is that Blobby is never seen partially dressed.)
Then, the all-in-one bodysuit, shaped like a pink and yellow bowling pin. He sees only a little of the pandemonium he leaves behind out of Blobby’s toothy mouth.
‘Once I’m in the costume for a minute or so, I don’t really quite think like myself,’ he tells me, from his home in Bournemouth.
The first time he put on the costume, he was apprehensive. ‘It’d been such a long time since that particular costume had been used, so there was a musk to it – I didn’t know what has been lurking within the arms and legs. He was in a bit of disarray, missing eyes and things.’
The pressures of Blobby’s 1990s pomp demanded that Blobby be in a lot of places at once, so there were quite a lot of Blobby suits. Denson had a feeling that his suit was formerly a stunt Blobby. The legs were ripped. People would recoil when they touched his flaking body. When Denson looked at Blobby’s palms, he could see his own hands like Blobby’s bones pressing through decomposing pink skin.
Gradually, Denson started to patch Blobby up. He repainted his fading yellow spots, bought Christmas baubles on eBay to make him new eyes – spares were hard to come by – and coaxed him back to consciousness. Now, no matter how tired he looks backstage, you put Blobby under studio lights and ‘he suddenly comes to life,’ says Denson.
