For any reporter, their aspiration is to tell a good story well. But what’s it like when something you’ve said goes viral? The BBC’s Political Correspondent and former City MA graduate, Chris Mason tells Interhacktive Nichola Carroll about the Mr Blobby incident.
“I had been thinking for a while, I want to say something on the air that acknowledges the central truth which is that we do not know what is going to happen with Brexit. I had bored myself answering questions on air about what was happening in very fine detail. The fact is I could not tell them what was going to happen next.”
Mason was at Westminster one morning, ready for another day reporting on Brexit and was scheduled to do live broadcasts every hour on BBC1 Breakfast TV.
“I thought this is it and so I went for it”
“At 7am the plan was to ask me something about Boris Johnson I think. It was the story of the day. About two minutes to seven there was a trailer that made a reference to Mr Blobby and I didn’t even think then I’ll mention Mr Blobby, but his name was just floating around my head. So when they asked me a second question during the live about what was going to happen next with Brexit, I thought this is it and so I went for it.”
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In response to a question from the BBC Breakfast presenter about what was going to happen next Chris said: “I haven’t the foggiest what is going on. You might as well get Mr Blobby back on for his analysis. Because now
“If I had subjected it to any thought then I wouldn’t have mentioned Mr Blobby. It’s a 1990’s TV reference and it’s a bit dated. Back in the newsroom there were no ripples at all. I did a live at 8 o’clock and did something broadly similar, but I made some sort of noise after it. I remember Dan Walker saying you’ve resorted to animal noises!”
“Journalism professors said how honest it was”
“Breakfast TV clipped it up and put it out as a tweet, it got a few comments, but not much. The day after Guido Fawkes the political blog and The Express website put it out and it got a bit of chat. Tom Newton Dunn of The Sun and Fraser Nelson of the Spectator did too, but what put rocket boosters under it was one of the journalism professors in New York picked it up and said how honest it was.”
“I woke up and discovered the Washington Post had written something about it and also the French newspaper Le Parisien. Not only did they write something about it, they dubbed the video ‘Monsieur Blobby’ and attempted to translate the word the ‘foggiest’. And so it went sort of bonkers. It was also translated into Dutch and I was getting TV interview requests.”
“Going viral, I wouldn’t recommend it”
“Going viral, I wouldn’t recommend. I was fortunate because it was a broadly positive thing, but mostly people go viral for saying something stupid. A reasonable chunk of people assumed that’s what this was, they assumed I was saying that I didn’t know what was happening, but I was saying that I didn’t know what is going to happening next. That subtlety on social media was lost, not least because some people didn’t watch the video.”
“It’s been the sort of talking point for the last couple of months. It definitely increased my twitter followers. Going viral is like your face being strapped to the side of a rocket which blasts off and you wave goodbye to it and you’re left thinking, where the hell is that gonna go.”
“The video was watched about 800 thousand times on Twitter”
“At the time the video was watched about 800 thousand times on Twitter, but it’s fewer than the number of people that watched it live on the TV which was probably around 1.2 million people. I guess anyone that has watched it online has chosen to watch it, but the oddity with digital journalism is that something that can go viral on numbers a lot smaller than that. It’s more about whether something is being talked about. There is that curiosity that it became something because of the internet and because of the shareability, but it was probably watched by fewer people than those who saw it the first time.”
If you’d like to hear more from Chris Mason, you can check him out on his podcast Brexitcast.