NEVER HAD ANYTHING GO VIRAL BEFORE

Published by Rick on Tagged Uncategorized

Three weeks ago, I was doing my standard daily (almost) walk, that, if I don’t cut any corners, will guarantee me reaching my goal of 10,000 steps a day. I was at about the halfway point, walking through Finsbury Park, and preparing to go into one of three or four tea places in the adjacent area, usually for a tea and croissant. On this particular day, my tea option was trumped by a youngish guy who came up behind me and said “Excuse me, would you like a cup of tea and a bit of a chat?” A part of me that trusts everyone looked at the man and thought, “It should be all right.” A more skeptical me would have asked questions about why he would want to talk to ME, and maybe what the heck was he actually doing. He didn’t explain much, and the sometime sucker that can be me said oh yeah, no problem. But I was also yearning for some tea.

What the man was hoping to do is video the conversation for a series of his creation that he was hoping to get off the ground. His plan was to interview elderly people and get their perspectives of life. Somehow the idea of a cup of tea works as an incentive. As far as I can figure, I was his first subject, though I have seen two other instalments since we did my segment. I’m admittedly a soft touch, so when he asked me a simple question like “What brought you to London,” I of course wound up going through much of my life story with that question and all the subsequent ones.

I told him of my show biz past in San Francisco and LA, and the continuation of that in UK, though not a whole lot about my nine years in Dagenham, Essex. I talked a lot about my present relationship, as well as the one with my late partner who died in 2013. And I also talked about the beginnings of my show biz career and how I knew I wanted to be in the biz by the time I graduated high school. In a later email that the interviewer sent me, he apologised for not including anything I said about Maggie in the final edit. The 15 minutes we talked were edited down to a mere three, as that is the limit on both InstaGram and TikTok, where the clip has been on for approximately two weeks now.

What neither I nor the interviewer expected was the response to the clip. Over the years I’ve been on social media, I think the most “likes” I’d ever gotten on my blogs that I write on my website and send to Facebook has been about 200. The people I know that have 3000+ followers will get that many likes just by saying “I’m off to the gym!” In the 13-14 days the clip has been on TikTok, it has 114,500 likes, 2700 comments (many of them saying what a lovely man I am!), and over 3500 shares. I must admit it was kinda cool that the only name I dropped in the interview, out of the few hundred celebrities I’ve met, was Robin Williams. In the 3-minute edit of the interview, he was not only able to splice in a one-second clip form Mrs. Doubtfire, but also a 3-second section of the episode of “Mork And Mindy” that I had done 44 years ago.

Also left in the clip was my talking about my latest career as a pub quizmaster, and I mentioned the pub where I’ve been doing it for 11 years now, The Shaftesbury Tavern, a mere 100 yards from my house. The kickback from that was a surge in attendance last week from the low 30s to 44 in a room that can comfortably fit about 40. A shame though, that I chose to take this Tuesday off, and had made that decision several weeks ago. Hopefully I haven’t broken the momentum.

It was also unfortunate that I didn’t plug my stand-up gig, which was last Saturday at Downstairs at the King’s Head, the longest continually running comedy club in all of UK, having been in Crouch End since 1981. The gig was mostly great, considering I’d worked really hard to come up with new material, but with each new bit, and its comparative lack of response, I felt compelled to throw in the old chestnut, “That’s a new bit; It may not live to be an OLD bit!” It was a sold-out house and a very responsive crowd, as it always has been, and my older bits, especially my Trump song parodies, did really well.

As for the aftermath of the clip, the man who interviewed me will be coming to the quiz next Tuesday. You can find the segment on TikTok at @a_mug_of_life. Then of course there’s that little part of me that, in a dubious trait that I inherited from my dad, makes me start thinking, “Well, maybe this will get me the fame I’ve been trying for these last nearly 60 years,” which is silly in the sense that fame this late in life would probably increase my stress levels, among other things. So if I’m only known in North London, that’s good enough for me at this juncture.

February 11th, 2025



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