Saturday 14 March 2020

Noddy's Bubbles Celebrate Forty Years of Transience

 Finally, some good clean fun. A hundred years ago it's said a performer could go their whole life touring just twenty minutes of material. But then talkies and television came along and that all changed. Not for Tom Noddy though. Here's the inventor of the bubble cube at a festival in 2018 performing almost exactly the same routine that he performed on Johnny Carson back in 1983.


(Update: that video has since been taken down, but here's some from 2019)

 I say "almost" because he now uses a tiny smoke machine instead of a cigarette, but the patter's identical, charming enough to have spanned four decades, and counting. This wasn't a comeback either. Noddy's just never stopped, never gone out of fashion: Las Vegas, Letterman, The Paul Daniels' Magic show, Bubblefest, Experimentarium, forty years performing the perfect act using nothing but soap, smoke and straws. Here's his very first television appearance in 1980, in which host Charles Kuralt describes him as a "wandering minstrel", as "transient as his bubbles". Well, yes and no. I love Tom Noddy.


"I've never blown an ugly bubble."

3 comments:

  1. Yay for Tom Noddy. I can't get my head around what it must be like to perform EXACTLY the same gig for so long with the same patter and everything. And I'm amazed I remember so much of it from the Paul Daniels Magic Show - I guess it must have been repeated as clips loads of times. "If you want love, you have to overcome surface tension."

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  2. Oh my goodness, that's the best thing I've seen in weeks. Thank you.

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  3. I think "reverse bubble" might be my favourite "trick", just because of the reaction it gets. The act's not just beautifully ephemeral, it's precision-tooled slightness.

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