Bad Grandad Attempts a Magic Trick That Backfires

Bad Grandad has been causing cheerful mayhem in the pages of The Dandy for years, charming readers with his cheeky grin and well-meaning but consistently disastrous schemes. The gruff, grey-haired troublemaker has tangled with garden gnomes, battled stubborn lawnmowers, and outwitted his own dentures more times than his long-suffering family can count. His misadventures feel like a warm tribute to the kind of grandfather who knows how to cause a scene at the worst possible moment.

Every so often, Bad Grandad decides he is going to master something new. Cooking? He nearly burned down the kitchen. Magic, however, seemed like the perfect fit, since a magician controls attention, bends reality, and earns applause. So he announced to anyone who would listen that a magic show was coming, and that the world was not ready for what he had prepared.

The venue had to be Australian. Bad Grandad has always had an affinity for community halls and footy clubrooms, the kind of gathering where someone inevitably yells out "show us your trick, Grandad!" The chosen location is a community centre in inner-suburban Melbourne, where the footy faithful gather after Saturday matches and where meat pies are taken very seriously.

The expectation is high. The trick itself is simple. The execution, as anyone who has met a Bad Grandad might predict, is anything but. Anyone curious about the cartoonist behind the chaos can learn more on the Andy Fanton about page, where the long history of these misadventures is laid out in cheerful detail.

Picking the Trick That Would Definitely Work

Bad Grandad spent three afternoons choosing his trick. He rejected card tricks because his hands shook too much, coin tricks because he had already lost most of his change down the back of the armchair, and rope tricks because the cat got tangled in the last one. He settled on the classic disappearing coin routine, which he had seen at a Crown Melbourne function he wandered into after mistaking it for the RSL.

The trouble was that the trick requires a coin. Bad Grandad dug through couch cushions, checked the pockets of his old flannelette shirts, and raided the emergency stash his wife kept for Australia Post deliveries. He found a two-dollar coin with a dancing lyrebird on the back, which he decided was appropriately theatrical, and a fifty-cent piece just in case.

Sourcing the Props from the Local Hardware Mecca

There is only one place in Australia where a man on a mission can find everything he needs and also a snag in bread, and that place is Bunnings. Bad Grandad arrived at the Penrith store just after sunrise, navigated past the utes and arguments about pine timber, and made a beeline for the home organisation aisle. He grabbed a velvet polishing cloth, plastic tongs from the BBQ section, and a roll of silver gaffer tape on special.

He also helped himself to a small folding table, which he reasoned could double as a performance prop and a tea rest. The staff at Bunnings, accustomed to retirees with strange shopping lists, simply smiled, scanned the items, and charged him the standard ten per cent goods and services tax like every other customer. Bad Grandad left convinced he had everything. He had, in fact, forgotten the most important prop of all.

Assembling the Audience at the Hall

By Saturday afternoon, the community hall in Brunswick was already half-full. There were grandparents clutching thermos flasks of weak tea, kids bouncing tennis balls off the brick walls, and members of the local bowls club who had wandered in expecting the regular sausage sizzle. Bad Grandad set up his folding table at the front of the room, draped the polishing cloth over it, and arranged his plastic tongs like ceremonial artefacts. The crowd, sensing something was about to happen, gradually went quiet.

He announced his show with the confidence normally reserved for late-night TV hosts, declaring he would perform a trick that had baffled audiences from Sydney to Perth. He gestured grandly toward his table, swept his arm across the cloth, and produced the two-dollar coin with a flourish that made two toddlers in the front row gasp. The fifty-cent piece, his supposed backup, was already lost somewhere in the folds of the velvet.

The Countdown to the Big Reveal

Three, two, one. Bad Grandad delivered the classic magician's countdown with the conviction of a man who had once sold used cars in Parramatta. He held the coin aloft, let it catch the fluorescent light from the hallway, and placed it on the cloth with great ceremony. Then he draped a small handkerchief over it, tapped it three times with the plastic tongs, and whispered the magic word, which he had decided was "vegemite," because he was a true Australian.

The hall fell silent in the way halls do when a trick is about to land or fail catastrophically. Bad Grandad lifted the handkerchief slowly and prepared for the applause he had been imagining all week. The two-dollar coin was gone. Well, mostly gone. It had rolled under the table, bounced off the leg, and was heading at speed toward the bowls club members, who scattered like seagulls at a beach barbecue.

When Everything That Could Go Wrong Did

What happened next would later be condensed into four panels of a Dandy comic strip. The fifty-cent piece, lost in the folds of the velvet, decided to make its entrance by launching itself into the air as Bad Grandad picked the cloth up for a bow. It pinged off the forehead of the bowls club president, ricocheted into a tray of sausage rolls, and came to rest inside the urn of hot water someone had set up for tea. A grandfather in the back row began to applaud enthusiastically, mistakenly believing the chaos was part of the act.

Bad Grandad, ever the professional, attempted to recover by pulling out the gaffer tape and suggesting he would now perform the even more impressive trick of taping the coin back together. Unfortunately, the tape stuck to his fingers, then to the cloth, then to his own beard, and finally to the jacket of the bowls club president retrieving his ruined sausage roll. By the time order was restored, the local Australian Consumer Law guidelines about misleading conduct had been technically violated, and Bad Grandad was wearing most of the gaffer tape as a makeshift scarf.

The Aftermath Around the Park

The community hall cleared out faster than a Perth beach when a shark alarm sounds, leaving Bad Grandad alone with his props and a thermos of tea that had somehow survived the chaos. He sat on the folding table, surveyed the mess, and decided the trick had actually gone rather well. The fifty-cent coin was recovered from the urn and given to him as a souvenir by the amused bowls club president, while the two-dollar coin was found three days later by a cleaner who assumed it was a tip and pocketed it.

Bad Grandad packed up his Bunnings-bought equipment, accepted a meat pie from a sympathetic local who felt sorry for him, and wandered out into the late afternoon sun. He promised himself, and anyone still listening, that next time he would attempt the disappearing family pet trick. Somewhere in a suburban newsroom, a cartoonist with a long memory was already sketching out what would become one of the most beloved Bad Grandad strips in years.

The Comic Strip That Almost Tells the Truth

The version of events that ended up in The Dandy was considerably tidier than the reality, because no comic strip can fit an urn of hot water, a bowls club, and a man covered in gaffer tape into a single page. The published panels show Bad Grandad confidently preparing the trick, the coin making its dramatic escape, the audience reacting in exaggerated horror, and a final gag that lands neatly on the punchline of bad luck. The artist, who knows a thing or two about making chaos readable, distilled the entire Brunswick disaster into a four-panel sequence that rewards a second reading.

Readers loved it. Letters poured in from kids in Adelaide, retirees in Hobart, and a particularly enthusiastic bunch from the Blue Mountains who wrote in to say Bad Grandad reminded them of their own grandfathers. The strip has since been reprinted in several collections and remains a favourite among readers who enjoy their mischief with a side of meat pie. For those curious about what the cartoonist has been working on since, a recent piece on the baccarat review insights reveals the kind of surprising creative detours even a busy cartoonist can take when inspiration strikes at unexpected moments.

If you have ever watched a relative try something heroic and watched it all go sideways, Bad Grandad will feel familiar in the best possible way. Follow Andy Fanton online for new comic strips, behind-the-scenes sketches, and the occasional glimpse of what the next bad idea in the workshop might be.