Blobbygate (The story of Noel Edmonds, Mr Blobby and Morecambe)

Recently news has broken of a fresh attempt by 75 year-old tv presenter Noel Edmonds to make a comeback onto the UK’s television screens.

Inspired by former Top Gear presenter Jeremy Clarkson’s enormous success with his show ‘Clarkson’s Farm’ Noel, famous for tv light-entertainment shows such as Swap Shop, Noel’s House Party, Top Gear (before Jeremy Clarkson) and more recently Deal or no Deal, fancies his chances at starring in his own reality tv series, which will be filmed on his New Zealand vineyard ‘River Haven’, where he has lived with his wife Liz since 2019.

Noel has tried to get into new fields of television before, for example in 1986 he attempted to ‘crack America’ in a short-lived stint compèring The Noel Edmonds Show through which he aimed to bring his trademark British humour and wacky stunts to an American audience.

In the week-long trial on ABC’s midnight slot he tried to be outrageous and irreverent, interviewing The Who’s Roger Daltrey in a bath, that sort of thing, but it was a complete flop. The LA Times, infamous for its scathing reviews, had this to say about it, “When it comes to British humorists, Noel Edmonds is right up there with Margaret Thatcher”.

Unperturbed by this ITV has reputedly bid £1 million for the new tv series, set at the vineyard, in Noel’s pub, the ‘Bugger Inn’ and around the nearby village of Ngātīmoti, (which he jokingly refers to as ‘Noel-timoti’) and, as with Clarkson’s Farm, it should reveal some enlightening insights into both his relationship with the local community and dealings with the area’s council.

Unfortunately it seems like this relationship hasn’t been that genial and Noel is just repeating the same old mistakes he’s made in the past with similar ventures.

One of these ventures, ‘Blobbyland’ was based right here in the Northwest near Morecambe and is the subject of this article.

Morecambe

The coastal town of Morecambe has been a tourist destination since the early 1900’s but in recent decades suffered a severe downturn as various attractions closed and it became overshadowed by its larger and louder neighbour down the coast, Blackpool.

It is widely renowned as having the best views of any English seaside resort, the country’s largest Pontins was based there until it closed in 1993, and it had a half-decent theme-park, Frontierland which closed in 1999, but sadly all this wasn’t enough to catch the eye of travellers on their way past to the more successful tourist traps of Blackpool and the Lake District.

Of course local council and business representatives became desperate to try and turn this around and mend Morecambe before it was lost beyond redemption like so many other seaside towns in the UK, and this is where Noel enters the story.

Mr Blobby

For a while in the early 1990’s (for reasons I can’t fathom) the most popular prime-time television show in the UK, with 18 million viewers at its peak, was Noel’s House Party, hosted by the eponymous presenter, and its mascot was a bizarre, mad, belligerent pink and yellow Monstrosity called Mr Blobby (see image below).

Mr Blobby became (much to Noel’s chagrin) more famous than Noel or his show (although Noel made £5 million out of it so I somehow think he wasn’t all that bothered) and for a while every advert seemed to be trying to sell blobby pink lemonade (quite nice actually), blobby slippers or blobby boardgames, to cap it all for Christmas of 1993 Mr Blobby had a surprise number one hit with his single ‘Mr Blobby’.

Bafflingly, for a song once voted ‘worst of all time’ it stayed up there for three weeks, beating genuinely talented artists Meat Loaf and Take That to the top spot.

We can’t ever hope to figure out what was going on in Noel’s mind when he conjured this creature into being but it was loved and loathed in equal measures so there was obviously some genius spark in there and, due its popularity, 3 theme parks were built to capitalise on him.

One, called ‘Crinkly Bottom’ was built in Somerset and another ‘Gotchaland’ in Devon, but the one we’re looking at here, built on the site of Happy Mount Park on the outskirts of Morecambe, was officially called ‘Noel Edmond’s World of Crinkly Bottom’ but colloquially known as ‘Blobbyland’

Blobbyland

Happy Mount Park, opened in the 1920’s, had originally been intended as an urban municipal space for families, and I’m fairly sure its designers would never have imagined in their wildest dreams that it would become Blobbyland.

Blobbyland was sold to local residents, many reluctant to lose their park, as the only way to rescue the resort’s failing tourism industry, with 240,000 extra visitors and their money estimated to flood into the town every year. Lancaster Council sank £300,000 into the scheme and there was sponsorships by British Rail (who even renamed the nearby Bare Lane railway station ‘Bare Crinkley Bottom’), Fujifilm and the Mars Corporation.

Because of this Noel Edmonds was promoted as the saviour of the town and greeted at 1993’s illuminations switch-on by a crowd of 32,000 in a manner that would make a modern A-list celebrity green with envy, and on Saturday the 30th of July 1994 the theme park was opened by him and Mr Blobby.

Things started off well, 5000 people, paying £15 a pop, visited the park in the first two days, and 50,000 had passed through the gates by the end of August, but projections had been a wildly optimistic 250,000 by the end of October 1994.

Officials involved in the scheme started to panic, in particular Lancaster City Council, who had agreed a deal with Edmonds and his company Unique Group Limited with councillors voting 59 to one in favour of a £300,000 investment. Some local journalists must have started feeling foolish too, including whoever came up with this headline;

“Morecambe is bracing itself for a pink and yellow spotted tidal wave of Blobbymania”

A Blobby Bubble

Things started to go wrong when it turned out that Blobbyland wasn’t all that fun and a better day out might have been had if it was still a municipal park; admission was expensive, so was food and drink and, of key importance, there wasn’t really anything for children to do, let alone adults.

The main attraction himself, Mr Blobby, was hardly seen, his daily routine was that an ‘aerobics instructor’ knocked hourly on the door of his house and shouted for him: “Mr Blobby, Mr Blobby, are you coming to do your aerobics?”, at which point Mr Blobby would reply “Blobby, Blobby, Blobby” and come out to do his aerobics.

This rapidly became very tedious for anybody still there after an hour and led to many complaints, remember that it was £15 admission and this was 1994!

When the council resorted to granting an alcohol licence and introducing a cheaper pricing structure this confirmed the suspicions of many that they had been sold a lame-horse and that the blobby bubble was close to bursting.

Bad reviews, complaints to the council and reports of rowdy, drunken behaviour at the park, which essentially consisted of just 6 gaudily-painted concrete structures, an aluminium shed standing in for ‘The Great House’ and a bar, stirred local residents into starting Happy Mount Action Group, which petitioned to have Blobbyland closed.

They achieved 6,000 signatures and by November 28th of 1994, just 13 weeks after its grand opening, they had voted 36-12 to close it, and so it was.

The Bubble Bursts

Blobbyland’s sponsors had pulled out by this point and Lancaster City Council accused Noel and Unique of being responsible for the catastrophe, stating that he had breached his side of the contract leading to them having no choice but to terminate their agreement.

Legal proceedings ensued and things became very heated, with LCC even claiming that Noel, who once famously said to a councillor “you’re the servant and I’m the ratepayer, so I’m the master”, and Blobby had not made enough appearances at the park and that this was the reason for the decline in numbers, they eventually used this argument to sue him for negligence and misrepresentation.

Some years later, in 2003, the auditor for the Lancaster district, Clive Portman, studied ‘Blobbygate’ (as it had been dubbed by the media) and published a report into it in which he concluded that Lancaster City Council had been “imprudent, irrational and unlawful” in the way it had conducted its business with Noel and Unique.

He found that LCC had originally agreed to a 60/40 share of the park’s income with Unique in addition to a share of all sponsorship but then changed the terms, offering a fixed fee of around £1m over the first three years of trade with them keeping all proceedings from gate receipts and sponsorship.

Mr Portman did think that LCC had made a ‘mistake’ when they ended their contract with Unique and started legal proceedings but that this did not absolve them of blame and ultimately it was they that were responsible for the whole disaster.

In the end the legal case never reached the high court and Lancaster City Council ended up paying Noel Edmonds £950,000 in damages as part of an out-of-court settlement, the whole scandal cost local taxpayers £2.6 million.

Beauty Surrounds, Health Abounds

Noel Edmonds and Mr Blobby have been persona non grata in Morecambe ever since, as, although Morecambrians don’t hold him solely responsible for the town’s decline they certainly regard him as a symbol of it.

Happy Mount Park has now been restored to the municipal park it is meant to be, and the town, whose motto is ‘Beauty Surrounds, Health Abounds’, has a somewhat optimistic air about it as goes through a butterfly-like transformation into a new style of holiday resort.

The town’s splendid Victorian Winter Gardens have been renovated and are now holding shows, plays and concerts, the sophisticated art-deco 4-star Midland Hotel is taking bookings, the old Frontierland site may be redeveloped as a leisure-park and over £50 million of the government’s ‘levelling-up’ fund has been channeled into the Eden Project Morecambe, a seafront ‘eco-tourism’ attraction which hopes to showcase the wildlife and landscape of the area.

So it seems that Morecambe, famous for its achingly beautiful sunsets, is finally awakening from a long and gloomy winter to see the sunrise on a bright and prosperous summer.

Morecambe
by Marie Tyson

As I stand looking out to sea,
I feel the wind rushing, cool and free.
The Bay, it sits – inviting admiration,
Says ‘I’m the finest in the Nation!’

The view of the velvet nestled hills,
That once held the whir of mills,
The waves splash with secret treasure,
Shrimps and prawns, culinary pleasure!

A place with the past and future together,
Fishing boats bob up and down on rope tether,
Children playing on the horse of stone,
This place which I proudly call my home.

If you stand by the sea at night and listen,
To waves which gently glisten,
You can hear a boats bell gentle chime,
‘Sail with me and forget the time’

I came here from a big gloomy city,
But, I don’t look back with pangs of pity,
I feel the pull of Morecambe Town,
A Lanky place –‘Beauty surrounds, health abounds!’

Marie Tyson (morecambe.co.uk)

A B-H

Sep 2024