17
STARTING YOUTUBE
One of the first questions we had was what on earth to call our new
project?
“How about Ollie Kendal and Friends?” suggested Ollie. “It has a
nice ring to it.” We all looked at him. “Ollie Baba’s Magical Cave of
Treasures?”
“You’re an idiot,” I said, for the first time. “How about a
combination of our names?” I suggested. “How about Olsh?”
Rex snorted. “You might as well call it Jolly.”
“It should be something succinct which really encapsulates who
you are and what you do,” Muncho suggested, thoughtfully. “How
about... Once Upon a Time in Carrotland?”
“I don’t mean to be rude Muncho, but that’s a terrible title to give
anything,” I said. “How about Korean Englishman? Just in
Hangul.” We all agreed this was a brilliant name and now we were
ready to actually make some videos.
We packed up Ollie’s camera and microphone and headed out
onto the streets of Camden, North London. The idea was to give
Londoners some kimchi to try, while asking what they knew of Korean
cuisine and culture. After a couple of hours we had a wide variety of
responses, and after many hours of editing we had our first little five
minute video baby. Now we just had to hope that people wanted to
watch it. On the eleventh of August 2013, 1,490 years to the day
since St John I began his reign as Pope, we blessed the internet with
our first video.
For the first few hours we watched with our right eyes as the view
count slowly ticked up. The only subscribers we had were the friends
we’d told about the channel, but then something amazing happened.
Unbeknownst to us, Andy, my best friend from school in Qingdao, had
posted our video to a Korean website called ‘Today Humor’ and
suddenly it was going viral. The view count started shooting up and so