I am pleased to announce that you can now buy Marley Fish products at this link here. 100% of the profit from all items in the store go to Wood Green Animal Shelter, so get something for yourself and give to charity at the same time. You’ll even find a picture that hasn’t been published anywhere else!
For the final showdown we had comedian Ed Byrne as our magical apprentice. It was a busy week for us, as usually we had the luxury of having filmed all our street and grand location magic long before the studio week. In this instance we had to film our grand location magic on the Tuesday before the live episode.
It was a bit touch and go as the weather was particularly bad. Snow would have meant the original bungee jumping location we had planned off a bridge would not have been able to go ahead. So, last minute, the location was switched to a really scary looking indoor bungee jumping centre up in Rotherham.
This particular trick was a real tough one to pull off. It took a long time to develop and on the day we were worried as to whether or not it would even work. Luckily it did and I quite like the finished product.
As many of you know, my cat Marley died that week which was very sad but he was still able to make a guest appearance on the last episode.
We REALLY wanted Pete to win the last episode, everybody had worked so hard it would have been nice that the series would have ended in a tie. It was an amazing experience overall, filled with incredible highs and lows, some real hairy moments and was, I’m proud to say, the first LIVE magic show to have been done in a very, very long time. Thanks to everybody who supported us and voted for us the past weeks, it has meant a lot to us and we look forward to meeting all of #teambarryandstuart on tour!
Marley copies Einstein’s famous photograph – then improves on his theory of relativity.
More comic-book style stuff next week.
As some of you already know from our Twitter account, sadly the real Marley Fish who inspired me to create his own comic series, was found dead last Monday. He was adopted two years ago from Wood Green Animal Shelter after surviving being dumped when he was very small and living as a stray.
He was intelligent, strong and full of character. He could make me laugh even when I was very stressed out so you can imagine that I was, and still am, very upset about his tragic departure. I even miss Marley waiting for me to walk past him and pounce on my ankles.
I was tempted not to draw any more comics about him but have since decided that as a cat has nine lives he shall live on! As of next week I shall continue doing the Marley Monday strips. Eventually I hope to gather them into a book with all profits going to the animal shelter where he came from.
The day he was found I had to go to Sheffield to film for “The Magicians.” I had a quick moment in the evening to draw this on the back of a box of soap found in the hotel room.
In this episode we taught the secrets of our art to John Torrode and Gregg Wallace from Masterchef. It was a week of food and bad jokes (Gregg tells jokes almost non-stop.)
The Human Pea was a highlight of the series. Such fun to do and great when not only you sucker people with the trick but even the deliberate mistake suckers people too! Gregg had a system to remember what hole to out his head up through at what time. It sounded more complicated than it needed to be. I hurt him a couple of times because he still had his head in a tin that I wanted to slide.
What a true sport John was for hanging up on a rope at the Tate Modern. We gathered quite a sizable crowd doing this, including a few busloads of art students who wanted to speed sketch us. One time we did the trick, a girl had no credit on her phone so she wasn’t actually able to call her friend’s number whilst John had it. We can’t forsee everything can we!
We had the entire nation thinking of cheese. Gregg literally had a dozen cheese related jokes he could rattle off, to be honest, name almost any subject to him and he could tell you a dozen jokes about it. The more alert of you may have noticed that the barcode we used had our phone number underneath it… doing whatever it takes to subliminally influence the nation.
It is the last week next time and we have comedian Ed Byrne. If all goes well we can walk away the series winners, but for now here is what really goes on behind the scenes…
Sad news: the real Marley Fish is currently missing. We hope that he is surviving the snow 
This episode saw us teaming up with our only female celebrity of the series, Tina Hobley.
The tranportation box trick is something that had existed in our notebooks for quite a while and we’d always wanted to try it. It is one of those tricks that is scary to perform in case the people involved on stage catch us out. Not half as scary, however, as the grammar of the Art Department when they first delivered the box…
We also did what is probably the most elaborate stunt for us for the whole series. We convinced ghost believers that we were genuine ghost hunters and the spirit that we were trying to communicate with was actually Santa Claus!
We fimed it in December before the second series had begun airing but unfortunately our first lot of ghost believers recognised us and knew that we were magicians so we had to work hard at fooling our other small group of people. Tina’s little girl said to her after the show “Why are they running away from Santa mummy?”
We were up against it once again as another item was dropped for being too extreme. This was a shame as it was already replaced for something less extreme anyway. So, last minute we had to re-write and rehearse something totally different. It ended up being the drawing routine and our roles were switched so that I ended up getting the ‘mouth to mouth’ at the end.
Below: Even if we did Skele-Ball it would be “too dark and weird!”
Next episode we cook up some magic with John and Gregg from Masterchef, and things are heating up already backstage.
Satanic Messages in Kids’ Cartoons Oct 4, 2008
Marley Fish Feb 13, 2012
The Magicians Episode 5 Behind the Scenes Jan 31, 2011
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