Mr Blobby Is a Fucking Legend

"I feel it in my fingers / I feel it in my toes," the great Wet Wet Wet once sang. But while Marti Pellow and co were talking about the abstract concept of love, I have been sensing something more specific recently.

There is disorder in the air right now, a crazed type of disarray. There are forces at work here, powerful forces, voices that shriek into the night and ruin television broadcasts. These voices can be explained. Their cause is known to you – it rises up in all of us from time to time – though the weaker among us try to repress it with all their bodily might. Its name? Blobby.

Over the past week or so, you have likely felt the influence of Mr Blobby. This is because he has, mercifully, been back on UK television screens, for which we should all feel collectively grateful. He has been on Loose Women to offer his views on Brexit and he has been on This Morning, where he smashed a decorative pineapple and appeared to permanently traumatise Philip Schofield by holding his head like a baby and screaming BLOBBY BLOBBY BLOBBY at it.

This is to say: television is good again.

Ostensibly, Blobby is back to save culture because Noel Edmonds, his One True Master and partner in chaos (look at Noel Edmonds' hairline and hair and tell me the man does not have pure havoc running through his veins) has gone on I’m a Celebrity, and Blobby is apparently his PR campaign, which is fairly genius in a malevolent sort of way. But really, Blobby's return feels like it has been brewing for a while. Perhaps, as the UK has plunged further and further into trash and nonsense, we have really been preparing for the next coming of our greatest emblem of both.

For Mr Blobby is hullabaloo incarnate. He fell over on purpose less than 30 seconds into his appearance on Loose Women; he is seven feet tall and wears only a bow tie. He is the purest embodiment of the British id, his form like barely encased sausage meat flopping over itself and onto the This Morning sofa, terrifying Rochelle Humes, who was just trying to read nicely off the teleprompter.

Mr Blobby ruins fucking everything (he was once referred to as "a metaphor for a nation gone soft in the head"); he is a steaming pile of rubbish if it had legs and a limited vocabulary. He is, therefore, all of us.

Who, after all, does not feel a kinship (and perhaps even a degree of jealousy) when they see The Pink One wreaking destruction across the ITV daytime programming schedule? Looming terribly over Carole off Loose Women, honking non-words when asked about Brexit; rolling around on the floor of any TV set featuring furniture. In many ways, life would be much easier if we all shed our chains of decency in the manner of Blobby. He is, you might say, our desires for freedom channelled and given shape.

You might say that. But you might also say that, at the same time as symbolising all of our greatest fears and wants, and the inevitable leakage of our national repression, there is also this: Mr Blobby is not actually about any of that. Mr Blobby is about shutting the fuck up about everything and laughing like a div at the utter stupidity of a lad in a massive blow-up suit jumping on a young Eamonn Holmes and then singing along to his own number one single:

I cannot think of anything I have laughed at more in the last week than a character that is best described as a colourful toe flinging open the This Morning studio doors and marching onto a live filming while knocking a load of chairs over. When you consider that this toe is also one of the most famous figures in the country and (it bears repeating) the recording artist behind a platinum-selling single that shifted 600,000 copies, is there not almost a tickle of pride in your chest for our horrible, deranged island?

This is the beauty of Blobby. You can project onto him and intellectualise him if you want, as I have here (it is very fun to think of useless pub chat statements like: "In the context of Great Britain, Mr Blobby is sort of the exact opposite of the Queen??"), but ultimately he is beyond it. He cannot be and should not be made sense of.

The point of Mr Blobby is pure chaos, nothing else, and it is my firm belief – the grassy hill I would lay down my life on – that there is no television show that could not be improved by him staggering on for a minute, ripping down a curtain and lobbing a fruit bowl before sliding off on his belly. For the truth is this: Mr Blobby, perhaps more than anyone in history, Is a Fucking Legend.

@hiyalauren