BBC OS Conversations: How going viral changed my life

The Documentary Podcast

BBC

Society & Culture, Documentary, Personal Journals

4.3 • 2.6K Ratings

🗓️ 4 January 2025

⏱️ 23 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

“I’m looking for a man in finance …” is the opening line of one of the most viewed, copied and remixed social media posts of the year. The woman behind it, Megan Boni, aka TikTok’s Girl on Couch, invented the rhyme as a jokey description of the perfect man she and her single friends would like to meet. She posted it one evening, and the internet went wild. It has been a similar story for Scottish actor Kirsty Paterson. Kirsty was photographed looking dejected in a sad green Oompa Loompa wig at possibly the world’s worst Willie Wonka-inspired event ever. The picture, which she hates, was shared around the world, and the initial publicity led to a slew of vicious replies. Megan and Kirsty are joined by Kelley Heyer, the inventor of the Charli XCX's Apple Dance, and Auri Kananen, Finnish queen of housecleaning videos, to discuss what it is like to ‘go viral’, and what happens next.

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	Hello, I'm Luke Jones. Welcome to the documentary from the BBC World Service. In BBC OS
0:05.3	conversations, we bring people together to share their experiences. This time, we'll be hearing
0:11.1	from four people who shot to fame on social media and whose lives have never been the same again.
0:20.7	Every year the internet makes stars of a handful of lucky, or maybe unlucky, individuals.
0:26.4	Our guest today share with us what it is like to go viral on social media.
0:31.6	And they tell us about the attention it can bring, not just from the public, but from
0:35.9	business too.
0:36.6	In a way, you're licensing your face and your social media following to this brand to sell their product.
0:45.3	And so the more they want to use it and the more they want you to do, the more that you can charge.
0:52.3	I wonder if you recognize this catchy 2024 earworm.
0:56.7	I'm looking for a man in finance with trust fund.
0:59.8	6-5, blue eyes.
1:01.8	Finance, trust fund.
1:03.8	6-5, blue eyes.
1:05.7	That's Megan Bonnie, or girl on couch, as she's known on TikTok.
1:09.2	And that is the original version that she posted back
1:11.6	in April. But since then, there have been hundreds and hundreds of remixes and parodies.
1:18.1	We wanted to find out what it is like to suddenly become famous on social media.
1:21.6	So we brought Megan together with three other people who have similarly found themselves
1:26.1	all over the internet in a big way.
1:28.5	Kirsty Patterson is a Scottish actress who caught the media's attention when she was pictured
1:32.8	looking especially glum and dejected in a green wig, supposedly playing the part of an
	...

Please login to see the full transcript.

Previous episode | Next episode

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from BBC, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of BBC and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.