Where Cake Happened - Part 3
- Kepplemarsh
- Jan 31, 2024
- 6 min read
The funniest and/or most mortifying thing that happened to me as a result of Kepplemarsh happened in my second year, in a crowded club. I've never told anyone about it.
On a night out I lose my friends and find myself fighting through hordes of dancing drunken students trying to locate them. A girl in the crowd shouts 'Kepplemarsh!' over the pounding music and I pause, mildly confused. 'I love your vlogs, can I have a picture?' she asks. I acquiesce, pleasantly flattered, and her friend takes a photo of us. She thanks me and I resume my journey through the crowd.
'Kepple!' This time it's a group of boys. They're almost violently enthusiastic, but I appreciate it all the same. 'Can we get a group photo with you?' Of course they can. By the time I slip back into the throng, I'm feeling rather dazed.
'Excuse me-' The third time I'm stopped it is by a different girl and her friend. 'Would you mind taking a picture?' But of course, I say - I'm high on my fame! - I look expectantly at the friend, waiting for her take the photo. I move to stand next to the girl, I even hitch my photo-grin on my face all ready. She looks at me with a combination of alarm and disgust. It's several seconds before I realise my mistake. They'd never seen my fucking videos, of course, they just wanted someone to take a picture of them on their night out. Obviously.
I don't know if that story is funny or cringe-inducing, but I like it because it's not often life delivers you events in the perfect three-part structure of a joke.
Sometimes I wonder what happened to all those selfies.
Kepple Madness
I led with that story because it amuses me, but it definitely makes Kepplemarsh look much bigger than it was. The reality is that, occasionally, people - usually drunk people in a student kitchen or at a student union event - recognised me as That Guy Who Does Those Videos. Sometimes they asked for a selfie. Once I signed someone’s arm. A few times as I was going about my business in town I would hear the haunting cry of ‘Kepplemaaaarsh!’ from the open window of a passing car. And that was about the extent of it, really.
Mine was always a tiny YouTube channel. At its peak I was getting a few hundred views a video - utterly unremarkable. But what was interesting about Kepplemarsh was that while I had less than a thousand subscribers, most of them lived in the same small seaside town as me. It was a bizarre and extremely minor form of celebrity and it could only have happened in a place like Falmouth, whose population trebles during term time.
My favourite thing about being someone whom strangers sometimes approached was that they were invariably pleased to see me. That’s a very, very lovely thing. There’s probably an element of self-selection to that - the ones who found my videos fucking irritating probably wouldn’t be coming over for a chat - but it was both gratifying and humbling to be sought out and told you’ve done something good. I think anyone would enjoy that.
I filmed 231 vlogs, most of them about my experiences at a specific university. My viewers by consequence could be placed in one of two camps: people already at that university, and those interested in attending it. A handful of times younger students told me, ‘You’re the reason I came to Falmouth.’ It’s quite a thing to hear that you have contributed to a decision that will significantly affect at least the next three years of someone’s life.
You may be wondering how it got to that point. Allow me to explain.
Penryn Campus Fitfinder
To be successful on YouTube you need to understand search algorithms - SEO - video tags; to become a minor meme on campus, you just need someone to post your videos on a local Facebook page. In my case this was Penryn Campus Fitfinder, a page anyone could message to have something posted anonymously. All Falmouth students and quite a few of the local residents followed this page. I’d say it was 5% ‘Who was that fit guy in the Games Room last night?’, 10% Falmouth-specific memes, and 85% people who had received next door’s mail. Pride compels me to mention that I was never the one to ask the page to share my videos.
In my third year I actually ran the page myself. Some of the posts in my second month got quite a bit of attention (BBC News, Falmouth Packet, Independent, Mirror, Daily Mail). That incident was stressful, not least because my inbox was inundated with delightful messages from people who had conflated the page itself with the subject it had reported on.
I loved the anonymity of Fitfinder. I frequently posted things that hadn’t been messaged to the page at all, often to stir the pot of whatever local controversy was currently bubbling away. I also saw it as my personal responsibility to up Falmouth’s meme game, so I was responsible for a lot of the shitposting that year - all the best memes were mine (this is an objective, indisputable fact, thank you).
The process of other students seeing my videos was one of accumulation. By my second year there was a whole new influx of first years who had been watching my videos in preparation for university, as well as an influx of new likes on Fitfinder - a new generation of students to get bombarded with my videos and mislay their mail. A lot of people would have had to scroll past my face even if they never watched a single second of my videos. And it turns out that if a lot of people know you, or are at least aware of you, what you say on the internet can have unintended real-life consequences.
That Guy Who Does Those Videos
In my first year the man who designed the Falmouth University website got in touch. He’d seen my vlogs and wanted to know if I would like to make a minute-long video showcasing life at Falmouth to go on the website. It was paid work and everything, a hundred quid, I’d be rich beyond the dreams of (student) avarice! I didn’t make the video in the end, but that I was asked to at all should have been an early warning that Kepplemarsh no longer existed in a vacuum. If the website guy had seen my videos, who else?
The wake up call comes thanks to my creative writing seminars. I’ve forgotten to do the work that week - prepare and deliver a 10 minute presentation on suchandsuch - so when, at the beginning of the seminar, the lecturer asks us to raise our hands if we've failed to do the necessary preparation, I promptly thrust my hand in the air.
‘I don’t think there will be any need for you to stay,’ he says.
I tell him I don't mind staying to be an audience for my classmates’ presentation. A pause. Then, again, but slower: ‘I don’t think there will be any need for you to stay.’
I recount this exchange in my next vlog, call the lecturer a ‘haughty fellow’ (yeah, I know), and declare that it doesn't matter anyway as his seminars are ‘a pile of wank’. You know, really mature stuff.
The next week’s seminar begins with a ten minute introduction before the lecturer sets us to work in groups. The instant he’s finished talking he makes a beeline for my table. He draws back the chair beside mine, sits down, looks at me. ‘So was any of that useful?’ he asks, ‘or was it all a load of wank?’
It’s always flattering to meet a fan.
In my second year two Film and Television freshers filmed a 30 second interview with me for their coursework. They did a great job, but my God I find it embarrassing now. I’m awed that they managed to get 30 seconds of usable footage out of me. In general I think I was good at, and certainly comfortable, being on camera; it just had to be my own.
There was also a Kepplemarsh ‘meetup’ at the start of my second year, when I got to meet seven or eight first years who had been watching my videos in preparation for coming to uni. I was extremely nervous and a bit drunk, but I still think it was uncharacteristic of me to do it at all. It was positively brazen! Once again I feel the need to stress that the meetup happened by request, I didn’t just decide to bless my viewers with the privilege of meeting me. My ego isn’t that bad.
I loved being Kepplemarsh, I loved making the videos and having people come up and talk to me about them. But as the videos sometimes attested, the entire period was a rough time for me. Having a lecturer quote my videos at me should have warned me to be more careful, share a little less. I didn’t.
So far these have all been anecdotes I’m fond of. The next blog post will go into some of the darker side to that time in my life. I won’t go into visceral detail, but it’s an aspect I can’t ignore if I’m telling the story of Kepplemarsh. Feel free to skip to the final post if you’re just here for the jokes.
(There are still jokes in part 4 though!)
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