Behind the trend: How multi award winning documentary maker Louis Theroux became an accidental TikTok Star

Going viral on TikTok is the marketing dream in 2022. Team meetings can hear quixotic requests that a clip or a snippet of a song achieve viral status – as if one team can dictate what an entire online community does with any content.?

Virality is always a serendipitous by-product but never a planned destination. A viral moment can be capitalised on, but it has to begin naturally and grow under its own steam.?

?‘Dreams’ by Fleetwood Mac went viral in 2020 because people loved watching Nathan Apodaca on his skateboard miming along between swigs of cranberry juice.

?‘Never Gonna Give You Up’, a hit originally in 1987, gained a whole new life through “Rickrolling” from 2006 and was fully embraced by Rick Astley himself. His good sporting nature ensured that it has endured longer than it perhaps had any right to.?

?The latest, and arguably most unlikely, beneficiary of the unexpected musical meme is British documentary maker and journalist Louis Theroux when a rap he wrote in 2000 as part of his Weird Weekends series on the BBC became a dance challenge on TikTok and then got an official single release.?

?Where ‘Jiggle Jiggle’ came from?

?Theroux began in TV as a correspondent on Michael Moore’s TV Nation in the mid-1990s and from there created the Weird Weekends series for the BBC. His deadpan-plus-slightly-anxious interviewing style (where he would let his subjects ramble on as he raised an eyebrow) perfectly suited the types of individuals, subcultures and communities that his show focused on, normally those on the margins of society, deemed too taboo or too niche for prime-time media coverage.

?The closing episode of series 3 of Weird Weekends saw Theroux in New Orleans where he interviewed a number of Southern rappers “in the hope of becoming the first white, middle-class gangsta rapper”.?

?He participated in a live rap battle on hip-hop station Q93 FM where his clipped and formal rapping “style”, more Downton Abbey than Downtown LA, stood in stark contrast to those he was battling.?

?“My money don’t jiggle, jiggle, it folds,” he rapped. “I like to see you wiggle, wiggle, for sure.”

?That really should have been it – a posh white man from England goes up against seasoned US rappers and viewers enjoy the awkward nature of it all. But it subsequently took several unexpected twists and turns.

?How it found a whole new life

?The clip sat for years as a vague memory in the minds of those who saw it on its original broadcast.?

?Then Weird Weekends was added to Netflix in 2016, reaching an audience who were too young (or were not even born) when it was originally broadcast. It slowly percolated out from there, but had not fully gripped the public consciousness.?

?Theroux, however, appeared on Amelia Dimoldenberg’s Chicken Shop Date series on YouTube on 18 February 2022, recorded at Sam’s Chicken in Harlesden, North West London.?

?When discussing music, Dimoldenberg said she knew that Theroux had rapped before on Weird Weekends and challenged him to perform his rap again, which he did effortlessly. The whole sequence lasted about 35 seconds.?

?A number of websites picked up on it when the YouTube video was posted to Dimoldenberg’s channel, notably GRM Daily, although it did not mention the rap sequence specifically.?

?From there it caught fire on TikTok where, as is the way on TikTok, it morphed into all manner of new shapes as people danced to it, lip synced to it, reacted to it and remixed it.?

?Perhaps the most important clip in pushing it into hyper-virality came from Jess Qualter and Brooke Blewitt, two young theatre graduates in Surrey, England, who quickly posted a choreographed routine on TikTok (they have since created a joint account on TikTok to capitalise on the viral impact).

?This added a dance, the real rocket fuel of TikTok, and it went stratospheric from there as people copied the moves and added their own twists.

?Amelia Dimoldenberg’s videos usually generate a few hundred thousand views and occasionally creep up to 1 million or maybe even 1.6 million. The episode with Theroux has now been watched close to 10 million times as those who encountered it on TikTok backtracked to find the original.?

?Less than a month after the clip aired on Chicken Shop Date, Manchester DJ duo Duke & Jones had remixed it and posted it on their YouTube channel. They melded it with other Theroux raps from Weird Weekends as well as Russell Howard’s Good News, adding Autotune to his voice and layering it all on top of a laid back beat. That clip now has over 14 million views.?

?The global spread?

?What should have been a very parochial English thing then went global.

?As soon as celebrities became aware of it, they all were quick to jump on the bandwagon, prolonging its life rather than suffocating it.?

?Rita Ora danced to it while brushing her teeth at the start of May. Shakira performed the dance on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon on 18 May. Days later, Snoop Dogg had done a cover. Then Megan Thee Stallion mimed to it. Even veteran actor Anthony Hopkins got involved in what he called “a senior’s version”.?

?Inevitably, as with Nathan Evans’s ‘Wellerman’ in early 2021, the Duke & Jones remix got an official single release on 10 June, put out by Robots + Humans, an imprint of Sony Music Entertainment.?

?It is credited to Juke & Jones with Louis Theroux, although there are multiple writers involved – Theroux, Luke Conibear and Isaac McKelvey (aka Duke & Jones), Myreon Howard, Maurice Mosley and Neil Diamond (because Theroux quoted the chorus of ‘Red Red Wine’ in his rap).?

?Theroux even joined Duke & Jones on TikTok to launch the single, bringing it all full circle.?

?It has already had over 66 million streams on Spotify while a remix featuring Jason Derulo and Amelia Dimz has had 2.8 million streams. Duke & Jones’ next biggest song on Spotify has just 2.3 million streams.

?It also revived what is perhaps the ultimate Gen Z stamp of approval at the end of the summer when it was added to Fortnite as an Icon Series emote.?

?Where next??

?So where will Theroux take it??

?He is characteristically bemused by it all. He told the New York Times in June that the rap naturally has a short shelf life and he has no plans or desire to milk it, preferring to let it run its course online.?

?“It’s not like I have a catalog and, like, now I can release all of my other novelty rap fragments,” he told the paper. “I’m clearly not going to tour it. ‘Come see Mr. Jiggle himself.’ It would be a 20-second-long gig.”?

?He did, however, sign up to TikTok at the end of April as ‘Jiggle Jiggle’ was taking off. “Late to the party but I made it…” below his first video post alongside the #rap #louistheroux hashtags. He has only posted three videos on TikTok to date, suggesting this is far from a priority platform for him.

?Should he wish to, however, there is a career template of sorts to follow as outlined in Scottish comedian Limmy’s prescient sketch from 2011 about a throwaway line becoming a global pop sensation.?

?Maybe now is the time for a co-headline tour where Louis Theroux performs ‘Jiggle Jiggle’ while Limmy performs ‘Wrong Way Down A One-Way Street’.?