On the 31st of January 2014, exactly ten years ago, I created the YouTube channel Kepplemarsh. Today it sits at around 900 subscribers. This isn’t the story of a viral sensation; it isn’t even the story of a boy making videos in his bedroom, not really. It’s the story of what happened when the camera wasn’t recording, and of what was lurking outside the frame of the video - sometimes literally - when it was.
In the space of a few short years I filmed 231 vlogs which found a niche audience consisting primarily of people who attended or were considering attending Falmouth University. It was a small audience but one I am inexpressibly grateful to have had. The ten year anniversary of a YouTube channel is a pretty arbitrary thing to celebrate, but it's an excuse to navel-gaze, and with a gulf of several years separating me from my student days I feel I can now do so without having to skimp on necessary detail.
This will be a series of short posts. I hope you enjoy the inside tale. I think it will be interesting, and mad, and funny, and perhaps a little sad, because that’s how it was. That’s what it was like to be Kepplemarsh.
The Prequel
Kepplemarsh had an older and more embarrassing cousin. In early 2012 a friend and I started making Minecraft videos of the most dismal quality imaginable. They can be summarised as a pair of 14-year-olds gratuitously overcompensating for the fact that they have only recently discovered the thrill of saying Fuck. In the beginning I used a terrible desktop mic from the 90s. It’s a bit of a time capsule now, those videos made by two boys who thought they could make it big playing Minecraft. I’d probably regard them as quaint if it weren’t for the intolerable cringe.
Our cultural contribution may not have gone down in the history books, but it was meaningful to me personally. I had made a friend and was having a laugh. The videos were a way to indulge my painful shyness - spending my teenage years in my bedroom playing computer games instead of going outside and meeting girls - but also to defy it: to have confidence, to be outgoing, even if only for the duration of a YouTube video.
In the year that we were active we made over 200 videos, most of them with genuine effort, none of them worthy of it. One of my more inexplicable ideas around this time was Marmite Minecraft, in which the forfeit for either of us dying in the game was to swallow a fat teaspoonful of Marmite. All was explained in the inaugural video: we weren’t old enough to drink and no-one would buy us shots. Simpler times.
I did the planning, the scripting, the filming, the editing, the uploading, the video thumbnails - everything. This is because I am a control freak. I wanted the YouTube channel beholden to my creative vision and mine alone, no matter how erroneous, no matter if that vision involved necking Marmite out of the jar for obscure reasons. I was and am a creative despot. A year in, I was tired of sharing and I wanted something of my own. I deleted the entire channel and told my friend we'd been targeted by a hacker called Sven. I don't think he believed me.
The Aviators Era
I look back on the earliest days of the newly created Kepplemarsh YouTube channel as a liberating time, an aimless time - or perhaps it was liberating precisely because it was aimless. There was no rhyme or reason to the videos. I numbered them using Roman numerals - hilarious! Book reviews - why not? Videos in which I forced Sims characters to piss themselves to death? Er, sure. I didn’t care what I was making and it didn’t matter because no-one was watching anyway. What was really happening was that I was becoming an expert in the art of procrastination, in this case from my A Levels. Nothing important, then.
The prevailing tone of most Kepplemarsh videos was one of almost frenetic enthusiasm, with perhaps a tinge of awkwardness. I was delighted to have found something I was good at, something people wanted to see me doing - not legions of people, of course, but then that never mattered to me. I doubt I would have bothered with my 47 subscriber special if it had.
Two crucial things happened in that first year: first, I got myself a set of aviator shades in unapologetic imitation of ELO’s Jeff Lynne, without which I wouldn’t be seen on YouTube for quite some time. Secondly, I joined a now defunct group of Minecraft YouTubers called Strangelands, in an uncharacteristically bold and sociable move. As with all my most uncharacteristic decisions, it was a good one. I made friends in Strangelands and even met some of them in real life: that was my first exposure to the universal greeting spoken by people who have seen my videos before meeting me, “I thought you’d be taller.”
I get that a lot.
At long last Marmite Minecraft got a spiritual successor in the form of Drunk Harry Potter. At 17 I still wasn’t quite old enough to legally drink, but I was savvy enough to order spectacular amounts of booze from Amazon. Same friend, same dumb idea, only we’d exchanged Minecraft for the Harry Potter games and Marmite for off-brand Malibu. It’s not unusual for people to learn or even to exceed their alcohol limit at that age, but most don’t plaster the resulting footage on YouTube and call it content. We should have stuck with Marmite.
At a similar time, the Strangelands group ran a Minecraft tournament in which members were partnered up to make videos together, which would be released simultaneously in an attempt to create an event and cross-pollinate subscribers. These are, I think, the worst videos I ever uploaded. Social anxiety reared its ugly head during a glacial couple of hours in which I acted as a total charisma vacuum. The guy I was paired with gives me every cue, every opportunity to not be shit, but the dead air stretches inexorably on. My contribution begins and ends at agreeing with whatever he says. He didn’t upload a second of that footage, having ostensibly lost it, and I don’t blame him. He now has half a million subscribers.
This was the true reason I wore sunglasses in every video my face appeared in. To many, it probably seemed the awkward affectation of a stylistically stunted 17-year-old (I did have a trilby phase in my mid-teens, less said about that the better), but it wasn’t a misguided attempt to look cool. Well, maybe a bit, but the shades meant I didn’t have to look into the camera lens; they meant I felt hidden, somehow, as though a few millimetres of tinted glass could shield me from the intense glare of my viewers. It was my way of being seen while allowing myself to feel unseen. I’m much more comfortable out of the limelight and off the screen, believe it or not.
Just as I had grown out of wearing a trilby, so the sunglasses had to come off sooner or later. I’m glad it was sooner. I dispensed with them in my first proper vlog, a rambling walk through and around my hometown, and never hid behind them again.
Destination: Falmouth
My handful of subscribers were beset by a flurry of almost involuntary activity in the spring and summer of 2015. 20% of the videos on Kepplemarsh were uploaded between April and August that year. The cause of my sudden surfeit of content was twofold: A-Levels, and the upcoming prospect of university. I had told everyone I wasn’t stressed, and while it’s true I never felt the slightest pang of worry, it’s all too easy in hindsight to draw a connection between the proliferation of videos and the exams I just about managed to turn up to. I was filling my days with recording, editing, and all the peripheral work that goes along with making videos: there wasn’t time for anxiety. Or exam revision.
I do wonder how I might have fared had I put effort into my studies, but it’s hard to get too frustrated with my younger self. My life would have followed much the same trajectory either way, I think: I had sleepwalked through school with the quiet assumption that I could achieve what I needed with zero effort. It wasn’t arrogance, it wasn’t even confidence, it was an estimation, that’s all. I didn’t do homework because I knew teachers would let me get away with it, I never so much as glanced at my notes for GCSEs or A Levels - mainly because I hadn’t taken any - and on one A Level exam paper I didn’t write anything but my name because I reckoned I must have made up enough marks already for the grade I needed.
That story pisses some people off. I’m aware it’s not one that makes me look good. But whether through laziness or apathy, my estimation was accurate: when the results came back, the piece of paper had the right letters on. With a bit of discipline and more than zero effort maybe I could have changed a few of them, but I doubt I’d be working at CERN now either way. There was only one university I wanted to go to, only one course I intended to take. I was bound for a seaside town called Falmouth, and I’d be bringing Kepplemarsh with me…
Post cover photo by Katie Currier-Teal
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