Dodgy Characters

I'm sure we have all been to bad Halloween parties. The canapes aren't worth bothering about, the 'mulled wine' consists of warmed-over Dr.Pepper and an old bottle of Aunt Phyllis' amontillado simmering in a Crock-Pot, and pretty much everyone's costume looks like they went around the house in a blind panic at the last minute trying to find something, anything, from which to throw together a costume. There have been times, I'll admit, when I myself have done just such a thing, but managed to pull it off simply because I did not try to emulate a TV character or movie droid.

No, I went with the generic. Clown is always an easy one to do, as is farmer, scarecrow, and my personal favourite, Charlie Chaplin. If you already have a black suit, then all you need is the little moustache, the cane and the bowler hat. If you possess a black turtleneck sweater and a zip-up leather jacket and black jeans, then just grow three days worth of stubble and you can be a spy, or a terrorist if you have an olive complexion. Add a fake sniper rifle into it and the possibilities are endless. But so many people go into this thing with a preconceived idea of what they want to do that they end up ruining it completely.

 As you can see.

Other people try to be original, which will score you points at the office if you are dressed as some sort of clever visual pun or an everyday household object such as a Twinkie or a Dyson Vacuum Cleaner, but take it one step too far and you and Ms. Herzenbanger from the typing pool could be banned from office parties for life.

Sometimes the best costumes aren't really a costume at all - just your ordinary clothes and a decent make-up job, such as this one modelled by our friend James.

And as our other pal Katherine shows, sometimes the quality of the costume's manufacturing outweighs whether or not it makes any sense at all.

The Unbelievables have been troubled with an increase in recent years of "costume how-tos" posted on various websites (wikiHow, eHow, Instructables, FamilyFun and their ilk, as well as blogs and women's homemaking magazines)that turn out to be completely awful. We were notified of the horrific social consequences of making such costumes by the family that posed for this photo.

The letter that accompanied this photo outlined for us how they were ostracised by their church, mocked at their places of work, bullied at school and even the garbage men refused to pick up their trash. "Please," they implored us, "find out who is putting these shitty instructions up on the Web and stop them!", adding "Help us, Unbelievables - your our only hope!". Well, our task was clear. We immediately replied, saying that not only would we be right on it, but that it was spelt Y-O-U-APOSTROPHE-R-E, for Pete's sake!

Anyway, after utilising the services of our worldwide network of informants, we had figured out that it was a group of some of the most awful characters ever foisted on a viewing public, who were ticked off over their TV careers being so short-lived and were doing this as some sort of payback. Their names were...

 ORKO...

 SNARF...

MR. BLOBBY, and the ringleader behind the whole shoddy enterprise, DAVID THE GNOME.

Once these aggravating little toerags knew we were onto them they changed the location of their hideout repeatedly, in order to throw us off the scent. But as I am sure Michael will be happy to relate, we soon caught up with them...