I don’t really know much about the Kids’ Choice Awards, but I do know that they gave rise to one of my favourite GIFs of all time. The annual awards ceremony, which is hosted by children’s TV channel Nickelodeon (Wikipedia is really digging me out of a hole here), has taken place since 1987, and it celebrates those who have entertained voting viewers of the network in the categories of TV, film, music and sports, with those lucky enough to win bequeathed a big orange statuette of a blimp. I’m told Will Smith and Taylor Swift have won 12 each of these blimps; Whoopi Goldberg is the only person to have won one and be a recognised EGOT.1 Like all these shows, you (usually) have to turn up in person to receive your award. The ceremony looks like utter chaos, exactly the sort of thing that an 8- to 12-year-old would go wild for – sugary, loud fun under the bright lights on a set of flashing primary colours with performances from similar stars to those who win: think the Jonas Brothers, Justin Bieber, Miley Cyrus before she’d been taught how to twerk, et cetera, et cetera.
Anyway, in 2010 they had Katy Perry on to present an award for “Favorite Movie Actress”. This was Perry still riding high on the success of her breakout album One of the Boys, which came out two summers earlier, with Teenage Dream lined up for an August release later in the year; it was “Hot’n’Cold”, “I Kissed a Girl”, Dr Luke-produced Perry who still had that blue wig and dumb, sexy 1950s housewife aesthetic, newly engaged to Russell Brand as of three months.2
There’s footage of it on Youtube. On stage alongside co-host Jonah Hill, Perry first announces to the audience that it’s Hill’s birthday, then encourages them to wish him a happy one by bellowing into the mic. The nominees for the award are revealed: Sandra Bullock for The Blindside, Miley Cyrus for The Hannah Montana Movie, Megan Fox for Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen and Zoe Saldana for Avatar. But Hill has a revelation: it’s not actually his birthday, and he was lying to Perry backstage, or wherever.3 A mock-outraged Perry announces that given he misled her, she’s going to announce the Favorite Actress winner on her own. She leans into the mic: “And your favourite movie actress iiiiis…” She walks across to the box containing the name of the winner, sat on a little podium to stage left. She opens it, looks down, and…
I don’t know why I find this so funny. Some part of my ancient lizard brain clearly just likes slapstick comedy, but I think it’s the sheer force with which the goo hits her that makes me laugh. It’s like someone in the Nickelodeon engineering department really, really didn’t like One of the Boys, and cranked the pressure up on the – what would you call it? – the slime-hose (?), and left it primed and pointing right at her. Presumably Katy Perry’s team was warned in advance that she would be hit when she was offered the gig by the producers, but if you look at her face as she looks in the box, she seems genuinely surprised that there’s nothing but a glistening nozzle looking back at her. Did her publicist conveniently forget to tell her? You can’t see it in the GIF above, but the force of the slime was so great that Perry actually staggered back a few steps and then fell over her high heels; she wasn’t hurt, though, and came up laughing.
She probably should have predicted something was wrong with the box. This is a trick they use several times a year on the Kids’ Choice Awards (in fact, in the original footage, as she walks up to open the box, you can see Jonah Hill take an involuntary step backwards, as though he’s been forewarned and doesn’t want to get green slime on his shoes). Turns out they call it “sliming” in the States, and you can see why it’s so universally popular with tweens. But to many of us, it’s better known as gunge.
i. The celebrity guillotine
There’s something weird about seeing someone as contemporary as Perry get gunged. In my mind, the stuff is indelibly associated with the 1990s and very early 2000s, and the TV that I watched as a child.
When I was a kid, every other series on CBBC or CITV seemed to come with the possibility that a figure of authority would be doused in cold, custardy slime the colour of Smurfs or algal bloom. Gunge was a guillotine for teachers, celebrities, reality TV villains.
One of the best series that used it liberally was Get Your Own Back, where a child would compete against a nominated adult – usually a teacher, parent, older sibling, and so on – who had offended them in some minor, usually comic way (singing badly along to the radio on the drive to school, say, or making them eat their greens). A typical round of the competition might see the child shoot footballs out of a huge slingshot to knock down a “wall” of inflatable bricks in a limited period of time, while the adult would wear a huge fat-suit-style goalkeeper costume and try to stop them. Or else there might be a big sumo ring and a game a bit like bulldog, where the child had to run across and the adult, again in a big inflatable sumo outfit, would have to try to stop them.4
There was a quiz element, too. “The Gunk Dunk” saw the adult sat on a sort of mechanised dunking stool, and given three chances to answer pop-culture questions posed by maniacal host Dave Benson Phillips. For each question they got wrong, the child would crank them another foot or so up a little slide, then finally dump them into the pool of gunge.
I was far too shy ever to even imagine volunteering to take part in a TV show like Get Your Own Back – nor do I remember really harbouring that much animus towards the adults around me, to be honest – but it and other programmes like it were the background noise to my time at primary school. I used to watch them at friends’ houses, sitting on the carpet eating Hobnobs and slices of apple, perhaps once or twice per week, which is probably why I so heavily associate the gunge phenomenon with the 1990s. But gunge had an older history: a tradition that began 50 years earlier on black-and-white British TV.
ii. Gunge: a short, slimy history
The first substance explicitly called “gunge” was featured in Not Only… But Also, a TV variety show which starred Peter Cook and Dudley Moore on the BBC in the late 1960s. A segment called “Poets Cornered” which centred around improvised poetry required a guest to take on Cook, while Moore acted as the referee. Whoever’s poem was judged worst by Moore would be dumped into a viscous substance known canonically in the programme as “BBC gunge” – likewise if they hesitated or deviated from the theme during their improv.5 According to the BFI, the vast majority of Not Only… But Also’s tapes were wiped by the BBC in the 1970s after the series was taken off air, but a line-up of the comedians who took part in the bit is a who’s who of late-Sixties British comedy: Barry Humphries, Ronnie Barker and Spike Milligan, as well as – very gamely, in my opinion – Alan Bennett.
Gunge’s real breakthrough, though, came with the advent of Tiswas in the 1970s. The children’s series aired on Saturday mornings from 1974 to 1982 (the name stands for “Today is Saturday: Watch and Smile”) and was absolutely mad for throwing stuff on people: water, custard pies, baked beans, gunge. There was even a character created to show up and chuck pies at guests, the audience, presenter Chris Tarrant and the cameramen alike, all without warning, called the Phantom Flan Flinger.
Gunge seems to have been apt for Tiswas for a few reasons: the widespread adoption of colour TV would make the gaudy, organic-looking slime much more impactful on TV, but it also – to put my insufferable cap of cultural theory on for a moment – really suits the levelling impulse of the 1970s. It’s anarchic and colourful, but also suggests something home-made, cheap and improvised; a prank-stuff suited to the Winter of Discontent. I’ve seen other histories of gunge (they do exist) suggest that it owes a lot to the British pantomime tradition, and I think that’s a valid observation. There are also gestures towards the much older and venerable practice of administering a cream pie to the face, which first featured in films by Chaplin and Laurel & Hardy as far back as the 1910s and 1920s.
Around the same time Tarrant and his team were sliding around in custard and gunge on the set of Tiswas, gunge/slime made its first appearances across the pond, with the launch of Nickelodeon. Perhaps thanks to the country’s links to Britain, it was a series out of Canada called You Can’t Do That on Television which introduced slime to North American audiences in 1979, before being syndicated in the USA on Nickelodeon.
According to an oral history of the channel, the original slime was invented by accident – the first sliming, in the first ever episode of You Can’t Do That on Television, was meant to see a bucket of leftover food and water dumped on cast member Tim Douglas, but the production was delayed by a week and the food went mouldy. Series creator Geoffrey Darby authorised the mouldy food to be used anyway, and the response from the audience was so positive that for the next decade, (safer, more hygienic) slime was used in most YCDTOTV episodes. The use of specific phrases would become the trigger to be hit, specifically saying “I don’t know” to be doused in gunge, and “water” for – points for originality here – a bucket of water.
From here, we enter the golden age of gunge and slime. The 1980s and 1990s saw a proliferation of children’s TV shows that used the stuff, including How Dare You!, Crackerjack and Noel’s Saturday Roadshow on British telly, and Double Dare and, of course, the aforementioned Kids’ Choice Awards in the USA from 1987 onwards. Such was gunge/slime’s popularity that in 1999, Burger King even released a limited edition “Gooey Apple Slime Green Sauce”.
Slime was king, and nowhere more so than on the BBC’s Noel’s House Party. By 1991, Saturday Roadshow had become House Party, and “The Gunge Tank” became a staple part of a programme which was watched by some 15 million people in the UK on Saturday evenings. It was around this time that the act of gunging someone shifted in the way it was presented on British TV, from a prank played by hosts and producers on guests and audiences, to something more akin to a means of delivering public justice (hence, of course, Get Your Own Back). It was increasingly common for people to vote on who would be gunged, whether it was the viewers at home calling in to cast votes or the audience members themselves. So while You Can’t Do That on Television’s slimings were doled out to kids who said “I don’t know” because co-creator Roger Price found the phrase irritating, Noel’s House Party condemned whoever received the most phone-in votes. To drive home the more democratic bent of the series, Noel Edmonds himself was often gunged, including often on the last episodes of each series.
Although celebrities who were gunged on House Party were warned in advance, members of the public were not; many were covered in gunge while wearing the outfits they were planning to later go out and dine in after the episode had been taped, and although producers offered to dry clean anyone’s clothing who was chosen to be gunged during filming, gunge victims were usually sent off wearing a one-size-fits-all BBC-branded tracksuit. Not that most people really minded – after all, if you’re heading to a taping, you’ve probably seen the programme before, and know what it entails. And, of course, children absolutely loved it: one BBC producer told a 2021 Vice oral history of gunge that, endearingly, “small children would shriek with excitement” after being doused.
Which ultimately brings us back to Get Your Own Back and six-year-old me watching a kid from Cambridgeshire gunge the dinner lady from his primary school. That was sort of it, really; from the 2000s onwards, gunge declined in popularity on TV. You can point to any number of factors – health and safety, the fragmentation of media consumption, the rise of smartphones and the internet – but for whatever reason, viewers were less interested in gunge than they had been before. There was time for one last great hurrah, in the form of Dick and Dom in da Bungalow – a raucous, bacchanalian show in which slime called “creamy muck muck” was tossed across the set at the end of each episode with real hollow-point aggression – before gunge’s televisual star essentially just faded. Gunge was gone from the mainstream.
iii. The secret sauce
A quick aside before we talk about what gunge means: what on earth was actually in it? Broadly, it depended on where you were being gunged.
Per Amelia Tait’s excellent Vice article:
If you watched someone getting gunged on TV in the late 80s or 90s, it’s likely the man who made it happen was Andy McVean. Nicknamed “the king of gunge” by [Richard] Greenwood, [the executive producer on Noel’s House Party,] McVean is a now-retired visual effects designer who was tasked with creating gunge on countless shows. At first, he made the stuff out of wallpaper paste – until the anti-fungicides in the mix were determined to be hazardous.
Then, McVean started using powdered food-thickening agents (“25 kilo sacks full of the stuff”, he says) which he mixed with water and colourings obtained from Early Learning Centre, a British toy retailer (“it all had to be stuff that if you did ingest it, it wasn’t going to give you any sort of stomach problems”).
Wallpaper paste – delicious! As you might expect, the American version of gunge is a lot more palatable, at least. In 2017, Delish.com reported that the till-then secret recipe for Nickolodeon’s slime was a simple mixture of vanilla pudding, oatmeal, apple sauce and green food colouring. And the “creamy muck muck” of Dick’n’Dom was literally just custard.
iv. Quo vadis, gunge?
Why did gunge die? I have a few ideas.
The first is that being on the telly from the 1970s to the 2000s was genuinely very exciting and unusual for most people, and being gunged was just part of the hysterical fun; it’s a little pat to blame social media for the death of things, but in this case I think it’s unavoidable. Today, being gunged would seem frankly twee in an age of ever-escalating Youtube pranksters and stunts. Oh, you had thickened water and food colouring poured over your head? Well MrBeast just paid for half a million blind African orphans to take a school trip to Harajuku! The competition for attention is just too fierce.
There’s also a difference in who gets gunged now, when it does happen – while it was unsuspecting members of the public through much of the 1990s, by 2010 it was, well, Katy Perry and Jonah Hill. I’m not convinced there’s much cachet to be had from gunging random strangers any more. There are no clicks, no likes to be had from doing it. I don’t know that it would cut through.
And yet… there are all sorts of hints that whatever dark id used to be boiling away under the surface of that custardy muck is just dormant, not dead. What is gunge, after all, if not brat summer? (It’s literally bright green.)6
Consider that we’re living through the early 2000s all over again: Keir Starmer’s in Number 10, after leading a hyper-centrist Labour Party to a landslide. Kids are wearing low-cut cargo pants, baggy tees and bucket hats (every teenager these days, boy or girl, looks like Eminem). Oasis literally just got bloody back together.
At this point, most of British pop culture is in thrall to Noughties nostalgia. They’ve already rebooted Supermarket Sweep (a programme which first aired 1993-2001). S Club 7 are back together (a group which first broke up in 2003). “Murder on the Dancefloor” was re-released this year (a song which first came out in 2001). They say it goes in 25- to 30-year cycles: just as the 1990s was obsessed with the 1960s, bringing back parkas and mod haircuts and stealing songs from the Beatles, so the entertainment industry of 2024 has taken to mincing up the hits of 1997-2002 and serving them back up to us like a sort of pop-cultural Spam.
The time is ripe. Every other thinkpiece on Substack is about how alienated we all feel by modern life, how irony-poisoned the internet has made us, how Netflix filler all feels like it was written by algorithms; so surely there’s appetite for something wholesome and unifying on TV? And as for the dominance of famous people being gunged over us normies, the likes of Googlebox, The Traitors and The Circle prove that the general public can, actually, be a lot more interesting than celebrities. In an age that craves authenticity, could the chaos of TV in the 90s recapture the attention of the viewing public?
Could it be time for a gunge comeback?
The winner of Emmy, Grammy, Oscar and Tony Awards.
Katy Perry is clearly not a good judge of character.
Truly a perfidious move. Who writes the scripts for these things?
The good nature of the adults who took part in Get Your Own Back will never not impress me.
I don’t know about you but for me, but this immediately conjured to mind a version of Just a Minute where Nicholas Parsons dumps Giles Brandreth into gunge, though I suppose it would need a visual medium to be any good. And it’s not hugely Radio 4.
I know brat summer has officially ended, if it ever really started at all, but it’s really more of a state of mind than a period of time, isn’t it?