The UK Needs Local Heroes Like Mr OiOi

Connor and his manager, Julie (Photo via)

Do we have a contingency plan in place in case Dapper Laughs ever dies? Do the so-called powers that be have someone lined up to assume his epic mantle? What if we wake up to a world bereft of a man who - and I'm guessing here, but try and prove me wrong - has one hair clipper for his pubes and another, separate hair clipper for his face? Answer: Yes, we do. His name is Mr OiOi, and he's famous for drinking his own shit.

Well, that's unfair. If Dapper Laughs dies - and, again, I'm not wishing death upon Dapper Laughs, but I do sort of think the bellcurve of his career has "fake funeral where he bursts out of the coffin and shouts about how moist he is" pencilled in for a controversial ITV2 airing in about 16 months - if Dapper Laughs dies or at least is struck down with sickness, then Mr OiOi is there: not to replace the hole Dapper will leave in our hearts, but at least alleviate the pain. He is one part Dapper's local-boy-gone-viral, eight-parts turn-of-the-millennium- Jackass, three-parts highly-groomed-eyebrows-on-muscular-boys-Geordie-Shore, and about 20 parts loco.

Watch a Mr OiOi video. It's 30 seconds of the kind of nervous energy you only normally find sat outside the headmaster's office for setting fire to something. Close your eyes and try to conjure this mental image: Mr OiOi, sat down on a clean sofa, with a nice cup of tea and a biscuit. You can't. He rattles like a wasp trapped in a half-empty orangeade bottle. But does that stop it being entertaining? No. It's a hyper kid in duct tape underwear determined to make you laugh. It is a man throwing pasta at his ceiling for the lolz. It's the kind of man who goes for a spray tan, looks at the results, thinks about it, then gets a sunbed on top of that. It's the dumbest thing I've ever seen, and it's all filmed in glorious vertical aspect.

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I grew up in Chesterfield, in Derbyshire, which was and remains to be - in my professional opinion - an awful shithole. Like: one of my legitimate fondest memories of Chesterfield is when the local Somerfield burned down, and we all stopped, on a still, end-of-summer day, and watched as smoke whirled in a high spiral into the sky. Another fond Chesterfield memory is when me and my friends - all mildly buzzed, sat beneath a concrete roundabout tunnel near Tesco eating a late-night haul of doughnuts - encountered a man and his girlfriend, the two most drunk humans I have ever seen. "Tell you one thing, lads," he said, wagging a finger as he unzipped his fly, taking a 15-minute long piss as he talked. "All women-" and he took a sidestep, juddering slightly, piss splashing in the cool night breeze "- all women, are whores." Then he zipped up, and grabbed his girlfriend, and they ambled arm-in-arm into the distance. I moved away shortly afterwards. It's not for me.

In Chesterfield, between supermarket fires and pissing Descartes, we were touched variously by celebrity. Wolf off of Gladiators opened our branch of Argos, signing catalogues for a queue of people who wound out of the shop and round the block and all the way down the hill to Peacocks. Kevin Pressman's son went to my school. My PE teacher was "the first man to discover David Seaman". The man who invented the steam train is buried there. Fame treads lightly upon north-east Derbyshire.

A statue of George Stephenson that looks like he's giving the town the finger (Photo by Phil Sangwell)

When one of your town's greatest exports is Max Power model Jo Guest, you create your own heroes. When I was a kid, it was the bloke who invented the alcopop, VK. Seriously: he drove around town in a VK-branded VW Beetle, and when it cruised past the main road outside my school, people literally fucking cheered. Six entirely unrelated kids in my year each claimed he was their uncle. I mean we literally fucking cheered. I don't know what we expected to happen with the cheering - maybe he would stop, reverse up to the school gate, ease a crate of VK out of his boot and hand them out to us, winking and nodding, "Here kids, have an 11.45AM breaktime buzz on me," all, "Love that cheering, keep that up," handing us each a raw, crisp £20 note - but we did it anyway. The closest thing we got to a local hero otherwise was an especially menacing tramp who terrorised the town centre until new public drinking laws were brought in and, unrelated, he got very intimately attacked with a hammer. Again: it wasn't for me.

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My favourite OiOi video - and, with tired eyes and an empty heart, I've watched a few of them now - is when he teaches us to "smash the pasty". In it, OiOi - wearing a blue plastic bag as a hat, the words "OI OI" scrawled on his scalp in permanent marker, rocking a red raw lads-on-tour sunburn - takes a pre-prepared pasty and, while a hyperactive remix of "Blue" by Eiffel 65 plays in the background, fucks it to crumbs. "Smash the pasty," he says. "Smash that pasty." At one point his calls the pasty a "munter". It's not art.

But, crucially, it's not for me. Mr OiOi is not for the type of man who flees home at the merest sign of a hammer attack. It's for people who stay and cheer at VK-branded Volkswagens. It's for people who skip queues into nightclubs but nobody minds because everyone knows Tommo, don't they? It's for a man known around Chesterfield a "Gluey Louis", renowned because he has the words "fuck it" tattooed on his head. I feel like Gluey Louis and Mr OiOi are destined to be best friends. There's a pretty substantial chance I'm going to spend a weekend writing that fanfiction, either way. Gluey and OiOi's weekend in Cleethorpes.

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Here's how a video of you drinking your own shit goes viral: you drink some shit. You put a video of you drinking shit on your Facebook page. From there, your friends share it - if any of my mates drank shit, I would share that, without question, because if you cannot click retweet when your mate drinks shit then why are you even friends. From there, friends of friends get their hands on it. And it spreads, through local networks at first, until a bloke with the words "fuck it" tattooed on his scalp shows you the video delightedly in a nightclub while pissing out two-for-£3 VK into a urinal. A small-to-medium scale viral star is born. A local hero for the ages. A man to hold up comically large charity cheques on page 3 of the local paper.

Mr OiOi after he was arrested last Halloween

I think there's a lot to be said for local celebrities. I think they liven up satellite towns in a way that actual celebrities - a Bono, say, or an Ant or Dec - doing a cheap drop-in or turn on of the Christmas lights can't. You don't see Wolf off of Gladiators, his hands smudgy with sharpie ink after a day signing catalogues, lording it up at a foam party. He goes straight home and irons his latex flat for a day on the Eliminator. But OiOi will stay. The cast of Geordie Shore or TOWIE will stay. Lads called Tommo will stay. The man who invented VK will stay. That tramp that got hammered had to move town in the end (because he got attacked by a hammer), but if that hadn't happened, he would have stayed. That's your local colour, your personality. That, and the Somerfield burning down, is what people talk about when they run out of things to say.

With a savvy enough manager, you can use you notoriety for good (reinvigorate an ailing nightclub; raise money for charity; promote a mad brand of Scouse House in your videos), for yourself (free laser removal and snapbacks), or for evil (incite a riot while dressed as Batgirl, hoying eggs at cars). OiOi, since becoming famous in January, has managed all that and more. I spoke to him about it.

VICE: I'm guessing you're not Mr OiOi at every second of every day. So who are you? Who's Connor Adams?
Mr OiOi: I'm an ex-soldier, I joined the army straight after school and I've always been quite a lively, likeable character. The videos started just because I was keeping in touch with the lads all around the country - my mates off shore are in the oil industry and also a few of my mates in the forces, and that's how the videos first came about. They'd send me messages going, "Do another video, can you do me another video? It's a nightmare on this rig." So I'd just send daft videos and a couple of them I'd post online on my own pages, and then when the NekNominate challenges were going about, that's when I got discovered because I'd done my own version with a slight twist.

What was your slight twist?
I shit in a blender.

Hm?
I pooed in the blender. I think everyone was doing them with like vile stuff - like loads of different alcohol, people were getting injured because of it - so I did one, saying, "It's not just about alcohol." It was about all the nasty shit you find in your fridge and your freezer. So I started putting olives, eggs, mustard, stuff like that, then I obviously added the key ingredient. Which was human faeces, out my arse.

So shitting in a blender really sort of made your career?
It did. I shared the video and then the next morning I'd been shared all over the country, like 533,000 times in the space of 24 hours. Obviously the next day, the next 24 hours I had nigh on 100,000 followers alone just on Facebook. So I set up a Twitter account and that exploded; I had like 14,000 followers within 24 hours.

[ Both accounts were later closed because, apparently, Facebook is not especially a fan of videos in which a man whizzes shit and mustard up in a blender then chokes on it while shouting]

So what were those first 24 hours like after you shat in a blender?
I mean, it was mad. It was a massive change, because obviously my videos were out there, everyone was talking about them. My videos took over Facebook overnight, so to say. It was all massive, I had people contacting me from all over about advertising stuff for them. It was so strange, but I've come to terms with it now. I think I lost about two iPhones due to that amount of notifications coming through at any one time. The iPhones just couldn't handle it.

And what have you been doing with your iPhone-busting fame?
There's been a few people who've been in touch who have clubs in Soho and the West End, asking when I'm down and what's the craic and if I'd be able to do any nights for them. I opened a night club in the town and that was quite something. The club itself was going downhill and wasn't making much money so I agreed to host a night there and put a good night on and I had nigh on 2,000 people through the door. The club hadn't seen in about five years. But it's still all up in the air, I mean, I've only been doing this since January. The amount of work I've done for charity… I started off doing charity events and charity auctions, for different causes and trusts and stuff, and that's had a massive impact on what I do as well. I've raised alone £257,000 just for local charities. It's quite a substantial amount of money.

Also did I hear you were sponsored by a local cab firm?
Yeah, Richmond taxis, yeah. I did a video - I sellotaped a thousand Richmond Taxis banners to me, and said, "If you're ever in a sticky situation and you've taken a stinker home and you need to get rid of her ASAP, call Richmond taxis, they're the people to see." It was a daft video like, and that had over 320,000 views in 24 hours. And that had a massive impact on the company. Hair salons, spray tan beauticians, all sorts I've done. Even laser removal treatment on my own tattoos I've done, and all that's been for free.

How long did it take after you shat in a blender for you to start getting noticed around town? Or was that happening already?
The town I come from is quite a small town, and it's got to the point where I can't even go out in the town. I'd just pop out into town there, just literally to pick a new T-shirt up, and it was just madness. And even if I'd go out in Newcastle for a night out or I'd go shopping with my family, it can be quite uncomfortable sometimes because you get people asking for photos and stuff and it's mad. I've come from nothing and next I'm this kid that everyone wants to be part of… you know what I mean?

Do you have any… you know. I don't want to say "haters", but: haters?
I have got some haters, just like everyone. But mainly what it is with me is that I've come from a normal working background, and suddenly there's a kid that everyone wants to know about and everyone wants to know who he is, and some people don't like it, and there is a bit of jealousy there. That's what it is: jealousy, to be honest. I've had my Mercedes smashed while I drive, and stuff like that but that's just from a small group of people. But at the end of the day, if there's people out there that hate me so much then I must be doing something right.

What does your mum think about your new found fame? And the fact you shat in a blender?
When I first started she was like, "You're a bloody idiot" but in a funny sort of way. But when I sat down and discussed everything properly with her, with the YouTube views and the promotion sort of things, she just said, "Well, I wish you all the best. If it succeeds it succeeds, if it doesn't it doesn't."

But at the end of the day, I just started this for a bit of craic and a bit of banter with my mates. Even if it had ended in the first few weeks of me starting it I can turn around and say, well I've put a couple of videos online, I've raised large money for companies. Nearly a year down the line, I can sit and reminisce and think if it ends now, then this is what I've done, this is what I've had, this is what I've raised through that.

Finally, how would you explain Mr OiOi to people who haven't seen the videos?
He's just someone that likes to entertain people and keep people happy. He's quite the character; you'd have to see him to believe him. He's like Marmite - you either love him or you hate him. But he's also like Chlamydia - he's fucking everywhere.

@joelgolby

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