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blow up hosts look at balloons
Blow up judge Dave Brenn and host Jaquie Brown (Photo: Three / Design: Tina Tiller)

Pop CultureApril 18, 2023

Does balloon competition Blow Up pop off – or is it all hot air? 

blow up hosts look at balloons
Blow up judge Dave Brenn and host Jaquie Brown (Photo: Three / Design: Tina Tiller)

Alex Casey watches Blow Up, the squeakiest show on television. 

The lowdown

It may seem like a fake show in 30 Rock or a short-lived series on Quibi, but Blow Up is here and it’s 100% real. Just as The Great Pottery Throwdown has done for pottery and Blown Away for glassblowing, Three’s Blow Up is the latest reality competition to hero another niche specialist craft – balloon twisting. Hosted by Jaquie Brown and judged by international balloon savant Dave Brenn, the series puts seven balloon artists through a series of creative challenges in the hopes of winning $25,000. With Lego Masters airing at the same time over on TVNZ2, fans of eccentric folk faffing about with colourful bits of plastic and rubber have never been more spoiled for choice. 

Dave Brenn and Jaquie Brown assess and mimic an Anglerfish.

The good

The contestants are extremely fascinating and loveable. There’s a mother and daughter who run a family balloon business, pitted against each other for the first time. There are best friends Pip and Paul (the artist also known as Zappo), who say delightful things like “far out, brussel sprout” and “I don’t mind a bit of hard grafting” (wrong show Zappo this is NOT Love Island). There’s the princess-mad Nancy and the children’s entertainer Trey, who may actually be filled with helium himself if this impressive amount of air is anything to go by: 

Contestant Trey jumps for joy in the Blow Up arena/carpark

Jaquie Brown is a great proxy for the audience as host, both endlessly curious about balloon art and endlessly terrified by the threat of them popping in her face. “I’m going to have to get used to that aren’t I?” she cackles as a cacophony of popping erupts across the room. Her chats with the competitors reveal some great niche trivia and techniques about balloonology – manicures must be matte to ensure they don’t stick to the rubber, and you can “double stuff” a balloon to make it stronger (basically a turducken but balloons). 

Another bonus of Blow Up is that the final creations are frequently incredible and, when they aren’t incredible, are at least quite funny to look at. Beavering away in what appears to be the underground carpark below the Wizard of Oz castle, the contestants create everything from angry anglerfish to life-size scuba divers to a family of turtles waiting for a “taxi crab” (prepare for many, many more puns as the season progresses). It’s astounding how they manage to make the creatures so expressive – tag yourself, I’m the terrified orange fish:

A terrified fish and a furious octopus walk into a reality show

The bad

Yes, Blow Up might strain as hard as Zappo wrestling with Mr Lobster-tini to mention that their balloons are 100% latex, grown from the rubber plant and compostable, but it doesn’t change the fact that balloons are broadly still quite a bad buzz for the environment. Given that balloons have been found in the stomachs of 78% of dead sea turtles and are 30 times more likely to kill seabirds than plastic, the first episode’s “undersea” theme felt bleak to me, and a missed opportunity to educate the audience on the perils of disposing of balloons incorrectly. 

If that doesn’t make you slightly uneasy, the incessant squeaking might. Although unavoidable on a show about twisting taut rubber, those who have weird feelings about balloons might struggle to relax in front of Blow Up after a long day. I had to pause the first episode about eight minutes in to observe the physical reactions I was having to the squeaking noise – strange salivating like I was about the vomit? Loose-feeling teeth? – but you do get used to it. Shout out to the unsung heroes who were in charge of sound for Blow Up, not a job many would envy. 

The verdict

If you can handle your family friendly reality competitions with a side of squeaking and a dash of environmental dread, Blow Up is actually quite a lot of fun. 

Blow Up airs on Three Mondays and Tuesdays at 7.30pm


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Blow Up contestants Paul and Pip (Image: Supplied/Tina Tiller)
Blow Up contestants Paul and Pip (Image: Supplied/Tina Tiller)

Pop CultureApril 17, 2023

The Blow Up besties brought together by balloon art

Blow Up contestants Paul and Pip (Image: Supplied/Tina Tiller)
Blow Up contestants Paul and Pip (Image: Supplied/Tina Tiller)

Balloon artists Pip Milford-Hughes and Paul Bates talk balloons and brain freezes on the set of Three’s new series.

Before Pip Milford-Hughes competed on Blow Up, she had a foreboding nightmare. She dreamed she was on the set of Three’s new reality competition, but she had forgotten how to blow up a balloon. A few weeks later, that nightmare came true when Pip found herself standing inside Blow Up’s technicolour balloon room experiencing the biggest “brain freeze” of her life, right in front of the camera. “I’m standing there going ‘oh my god, I don’t know what I need, I don’t know what I want’,” she remembers. 

That’s the pressure of blowing up balloons on television, and nobody knows that better than Pip. She’s one of seven New Zealanders competing on Blow Up, a new series that showcases the creative talents of our best balloon artists. Hosted by Jaquie Brown and judged by balloon expert Dave Brenn, Blow Up contestants will be challenged to build a variety of large-scale, visually stunning balloon creations (which Three says will be broken down to zero waste with no balloons ending up in landfill).

The Blow Up contestants stand together smiling at the camera, arms outstretched
The Blow Up contestants, including Paul (centre right) and Pip (second from right). Photo: Three

Pip lives and works as a balloonologist in Ōtepoti Dunedin, and says the opportunity to work with other creative artists was the reason she applied for the show. “You don’t often get to twist alongside somebody else, so you forget how infectious it is when everybody else is doing it,” she says. Her fellow Blow Up contestants include an interior designer, a student and a face painter, but there’s no chance of Pip being lonely on Blow Up. She’s also competing alongside her best friend Paul Bates, a children’s entertainer best known to many as Zappo the Magician.

After first meeting at a Palmerston North magician’s convention back in 2009, Paul and Pip’s friendship saw them go on tour together, travelling around Australia teaching magic and balloon skills. They love the wonder and delight that balloon art brings others – Pip recently made a life-sized ride-on lawnmower out of balloons as a gift for a retiring Dunedin groundskeeper. “The feedback from the people that you give the balloons to, whether it’s for a present or you’re going into a rest home or even at a birthday party, the joy on the recipient’s face is really empowering,” Pip says. “You give it away, but you get so much back.”

Two people stand and look at balloons
Blow Up judge Dave Brenn and host Jaquie Brown (Photo: Three)

Despite competing against each other for the show’s grand prize of $25,000, the friends reckon the Blow Up experience only strengthened their connection. “Pip’s the type of person that if you were in a running race, if you fell over at the finish line, she’d stop, pick you up, and then continue,” Paul says, adding he often asked Pip for advice during the challenges. He came on the show simply to have fun and to build on his balloon skills. “It wasn’t until after the first episode it dawned to me that this is a competition. I mean, I live in a world of rainbows and lollipops and things like that,” he jokes. 

Paul describes walking into the magical Blow Up balloon room – the balloon equivalent of the Lego Masters Brick Pit – as like stepping into Willy Wonka’s world of imagination. This is where the balloon artists can really let their imaginations run wild, where they can build incredible sculptures out of nothing but air and latex, always knowing that one wrong move can ruin everything. One puff too many can destroy the delicate proportions of their creations, and when a balloon bursts in your face on television, there’s nowhere to hide. 

Blown away (Photo: Three)

It’s a high pressure environment that demands both quick thinking and attention to detail, and both Paul and Pip say the show pushed them beyond their balloon comfort zones. Every challenge was a mental and physical test that lasted between seven and 14 hours, and as the contestants wrangled with bigger and bigger balloons, they would finish each challenge dripping with sweat. “A lot of the battle was against myself, because you always have this negative thing, you know: can I do it?” says Pip, who had never made such large-scale creations before. “A lot of it was competing with what was going on in my head.” 

Brain freeze or not, the chance to celebrate balloon art on national television was a dream come true for Pip and Paul. They’re proud of their creations on the show and pleased they could share the experience of appearing on television with each other. Most of all, they hope the show will give viewers a new appreciation for their work. “I’m really hoping people go ‘wow, I didn’t know that you could make balloon art out of that’,’” Pip says. “Balloon artistry isn’t just a cheap, frivolous thing. It’s a skill and it’s an art.” 

Blow Up screens on Monday and Tuesday nights at 7.30pm on Three and streams on ThreeNow.


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