I’ve been bitten by the TikTok bug

In theory TikTok knows nothing about me. I have posted two videos: one of my grandsons kicking a football in a garden, the other of their much younger selves running through the dry desert house at Paignton zoo. They are the most unremarkable clips imaginable. The last time I looked, the football being kicked in the garden had been watched 3,700 times and ‘liked’ by 650 people. Astonishing. Apart from those two videos, I haven’t posted.

My grandsons love TikTok. They are on it every day. They post videos of football cards they have collected and the ones they want to swap. Except when my grandsons post one, I never press the red heart to ‘like’ a video that appears on my daily feed. So while there are grounds for the TikTok preference algorithm thinking I probably like football, and that I am old enough to be a grandfather, it can’t possibly know anything else.

So what do they send me on my daily feed? With frightening precision I get the northern comic Roy Chubby Brown. Remember him? The flying helmet and goggles? I like Roy Chubby Brown and always have done. But Roy isn’t everyone’s cup of tea, to put it mildly, and his career was severely curtailed on the grounds of public decency long before the term ‘political correctness’ was coined. He overstepped what might be said to be the wider boundaries agreed on by ordinary, broad-minded British people long before this narrower Puritanical set was imposed from above.

So him. I get Jim Davidson being interviewed by Nigel Farage. I get Katie Hopkins. I get sunburned builders’ conspiracy theories. I get reminiscences of old-time east London and Essex gangsters.