The Accidental Influencer

Introduction

In a 2019 study* of two thousand 13- to 38-year-old Americans, over half of the respondents said they would become an influencer given the opportunity, and 86 per cent would post sponsored content (known as ‘sponcon’). I was one of the lucky few who got that chance, and I’m going to tell you why I wouldn’t do it again.

Although I’d never describe myself as an influencer, for the purposes of this book I think it’s right to accept that I am – or at least, I was. At my peak, I had almost 150,000 followers and still I acted like the influencer version of that girl who claims they’re ‘not like other girls’ while doing everything that ‘other girls’ do, including sponcon, personal appearances, gifted stays and press trips. I wanted to be the Instagram cool girl, the renegade who sat on the sidelines, satirising the people who really cared. But I really cared. I cared about Instagram a lot. And much like the cool girl who eats junk food while remaining a size eight, and who loves sports, farts essential oils and is a bit above gossiping, actually, the Instagram cool girl doesn’t exist. I thought I could be an influencer without really being an influencer. I thought I could have lots of followers without needing followers. I thought I could monetise my account without selling out. I thought that I was different, that I wasn’t like other girls. But I was, and that’s why I had to stop.

Like a lot of women who grew up in the nineties and the noughties, I was led to believe that I needed to make myself smaller; I was too loud, too emotional, too angry, too big. I drank too much, told too many jokes, knew I was funnier than the boys.

By the time I reached my mid-twenties, I’d had enough. Enough of being presented with new ways to control myself so I could be a nice girl. Enough of being denied opportunities because I didn’t fit a specific mould. I was tired of waiting for someone to tell me I was funny. I saw social media as a fast-track to success, and for a while, it was.

* https://morningconsult.com/form/influencer-report-engaging-gen-z-and-millennials-download/

The Origins of Influence

Who was the original influencer? A cursory google assures me that it was Shakespeare, but it could also be Andy Warhol, Nancy Mitford, Princess Margaret or God. It seems ridiculous to compare the people we deem ‘influencers’ today to people who are undoubtedly icons, but before you could fill your feed with identikit women in luxe athleisure, icons were influencers and they could make anything fly off the shelves.

The first ever #collab was in 1767 between Wedgwood and the Royal family. After Queen Charlotte gave them permission to name their tableware Queen’s Ware, their family business turned into a global enterprise, causing Kardashian levels of market domination. No wonder Meghan and Harry left the Royal family. They just wanted to put their faces on their own tea towels. Is that too much to ask?

As influence has evolved, so has the type of person taking advantage of it. Michael Jordan’s Nike collaboration was the Yeezy of his day. Elizabeth Hurley’s contract with Estée Lauder made her a vintage Kylie Jenner. Celebrity endorsement hasn’t ended, but followers are slowly starting to eclipse the value of fame.

When I was at school, there wasn’t a single girl who didn’t want to be Sienna Miller. She was the face that launched a thousand coin belts and she represented everything I wished I was. Naturally beautiful, effortlessly stylish, going out with actual Jude Law.

Her influence was potent. Almost overnight my all-girls boarding school looked like a Boho episode of Black Mirror, where the school becomes populated by blonde, back-brushed clones with bad highlights, wearing fake UGGs, ratty gilets and comically enormous belts.

We could afford to become bargain-bin versions of her with our pocket money. She was the first celebrity who to me seemed within reach. I thought if I met her, we’d definitely be friends. I made it my mission to emulate her casual je ne sais quois. Convinced I was only a gypsy skirt away from an ‘I woke up like this’ nonchalance that could be bought in Portobello Market.

‘The less I look like I’ve tried, the better,’ I told myself, before securing a gladiator belt around my pyjama bottoms and heading to the pub.

When binning said ratty gilet years later, my mother remembers that at least it was better than the Paris Hilton phase, during which I committed to a Miss Sixty mini-skirt so short it came with in-built denim knickers.

Teenage girls have always wanted to be just like their favourite celebrities, but without Instagram, we had to settle for scanning the pages of our favourite magazines. I favoured a combination of what I considered to be high and low literature in my adolescence. The high was Tatler and the low was Heat, ensuring I was drip-fed inspiration from all of my idols, American celebrities with DUIs and nineties’ ‘It Girls’ with coke problems. At my school, girls taking politics A level were allowed a newspaper account to help them stay on top of current affairs. What they hadn’t accounted for was that the newsagent didn’t know the score, and along with the FT, we all signed ourselves up for an annual subscription to Heat, Now, Closer and Tatler.

Tara Palmer-Tomkinson, Lady Victoria Hervey, Paris Hilton and Tara Reid were, to me, the original influencers. I would have cut off my hand to go on a night out with these bottle-blonde legends. They were famous for being famous and they gave no fucks. They were privileged and problematic but nobody cared because they looked like so much fun. They told us you could be famous for being gorgeous and a laugh. When I get my braces off and stop looking like Heath Ledger, I thought, I am going to be an It Girl.

My dream encounter with a real-life It Girl came in my twenties, when my friend Liv and I had turned up at her parents’ house hungover after a party. Her godfather was coming over and we were told that he had a new girlfriend. We were more than a bit surprised that the girlfriend was Tara Palmer-Tomkinson. I knew by then that when the lights go up in Chinawhite it still has a sticky floor and I was desperate to hear her tales from the tabloid trenches.

‘I bet you a tenner I can get her to talk about coke,’ I said.

‘£20 if you can get her on to her nose.’

When we walked back into the kitchen moaning about our hangovers, it was like a red rag to a bull. Tara was the funniest, most charismatic and most indiscreet person I’d ever met. She immediately launched into tales from her party years, her nose job and the trick she used to play on Prince Charles. As a child, she would mix up a concoction of peanut butter and Nutella, pile it onto the carpet and step on it.

‘Charles, look what the corgis have done,’ she’d say. Then she’d pick up her shoe and lick it.

She told us that she used to throw bags of cocaine into the air and sniff, and that she always packed her passport on a night out because she never knew where she would end up. Once, she said, she had played a game where she and her friends had spun a globe while blindfolded and had to fly wherever their finger landed. She started coming down in Krakow.

Unfortunately, I was never destined to be an It Girl of Tara’s calibre. In the circles I ended up moving in, everyone was far more concerned with wheatgrass than cocaine.

Unsure, insecure teenage girls are the perfect influencees, and although I like to think I’ve now gone my own way, my taste now still isn’t really mine. Today I am wearing bootcut black jeans from Zara, cowboy boots from GANNI and a white shirt with an impossibly large collar that I saw one of the skinny French influencers wearing on Instagram. These women lurk in the background of my every sartorial choice, falsely leading me to believe that with every new Breton top or trench, I too will come closer to becoming thin and French.

Unsurprisingly, the collar doesn’t make me look thin or French. Instead, I look like I’m posing for a portrait in sixteenth-century Holland or I’m the ghost of a Victorian child. Later today I will probably do an exercise class in a bid to rail against the will of nature, and because the female body type currently considered acceptable involves abs; I know I will never have abs, no matter how hard I try, but try I must, because the Instagram algorithm tells me that everybody else has them.

This probably all sounds quite depressing. Those of you familiar with my work will know that I did my absolute best to take people out of the cycle of unattainable aspiration we’re bombarded with on Instagram, but I’m not immune to influence. The influencers have invaded my sovereignty, and I am cursed to like what they like because you cannot be what you cannot see, and today everyone I can see, is thin and fucking French.

The word ‘influencer’ in the terms that we’ve come to understand was added to the dictionary on 9 May 2019. This new breed of influencer fed into our desire to platform people who are ‘just like us’. Celebs are no longer just in glossy magazines and on red carpets. They’re in our homes, on our televisions and now in our pockets. The most valuable commodity a celebrity can have is ‘relatability’. The top ten most successful influencers named in a YouGov poll were mostly ‘normal people’ like Joe Wicks, Joe Sugg and Mrs Hinch. We’re happier to be sold to by people with whom we believe we share common ground.

The efficacy of influencers comes from their ability to make you feel like you could be just like them. You will likely never be as rich or successful as Zoella, but she still wears jumpers from Topshop and uses Rimmel eyeliner. Her success isn’t intimidating, but tangible.

I often wonder if I should be resisting influence. To admit to being influenced is to give up the attractive idea that, as individuals or societies, we are entirely self-contained. I’ve thought about who I might be and what I’d look like without external influence, and I would probably be an agoraphobic swamp demon with a dangerously large collection of fleeces. I’m inherently drawn to things that feel soft. My love of fleece, I assure you, is sovereign.

In Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, Lord Henry says, ‘all influence is immoral … to influence a person is to give him one’s own soul. He does not think his natural thoughts, or burn with his natural passions. His virtues are not real to him. His sins, if there are such things as sins, are borrowed.’

When I look at influencers, knowing what I do, I can’t help but think that Instagram has sucked the soul out of being sold to. My idols of old were messy, hilarious and iconic. I devoured Tara’s satirical, Sunday Times column, ‘Yah’. I got hammered in the nightclubs they frequented. Tara Palmer-Tomkinson and Darren Day in I’m a Celebrity Get Me Out of Here were my Romeo and Juliet. The lives of the influencers I follow now are curated to the point of being mundane. Posey couple shots lead to black-and-white weddings in tasteful gowns made by designer friends. TPT just wanted to be loved. She reminded me of me.

200 Followers

It’s 2015, and I’m comparing myself to Lena Dunham. Again. It’s a Monday morning and I’m hungover and self-flagellating. Lena has become my measuring stick for success or lack thereof, and checking up on her has become a ritual. No matter that she lives in a New York brownstone with her rock star boyfriend while I live in a basement in Hackney with my best friend, Liv.

We’re the same age and we’re in similar(ish) industries, so I’m using Lena’s Instagram account to remind myself of what could have been in another life. I am twenty-seven and slowly accepting that I’ve left the age where staggering success will see me labelled as an ingénue.

Why does success look so much sweeter before you’re twenty-five? I wonder as I shovel Nutella toast into my mouth. People never call you a genius when you make it in your thirties.

I land on a post that Lena’s written about her mental health, and how annoying it is when people tell you to exercise. ‘It ain’t about the ass, it’s about the brain. Thank you,’ she writes sassily while posing in a sports bra and leggings.

‘Another thing we have in common,’ I think. We’re both scriptwriters in our twenties with depression and anxiety, only difference is Lena’s scripts get made and I’m still hanging round television execs hoping my ubiquitous presence is all that’s needed for a producer to crack and give me a shot.

It’s comforting that she talks so openly about her mental health. I rarely mention mine, except to Liv. She’s been through similar issues and she gets it. We are in agreement that Sertraline makes you look and feel like an owl on crack.

‘Do I still have red-wine fangs?’ I ask her, rubbing my top lip.

‘No, but you have Nutella in your hair.’

Starting your week at your lowest ebb doesn’t bode well.

‘What I wouldn’t give for a 3.2-million-dollar book deal,’ I daydream while attempting to dry hump my way onto a packed tube. ‘I’d probably need millions of Instagram followers first. Or to be family friends with Meryl Streep.’

YouTuber Zoella has just signed a two-book deal with Penguin, in spite of not having shown any previous literary ambitions. I’d tried putting out a couple of vlogs, but I found that it made me feel old and technologically inept. It was also pretty difficult finding time to film with a full-time job.

I was working in television, as a development researcher for the company that makes MasterChef. My foot in the door had come unexpectedly, after I’d been made redundant from a job writing product descriptions in a basement below a shop. It was so badly run they kept forgetting to pay me and I once took out a Wonga loan to pay my rent. The day they let me go, the CEO accidentally transferred me £500 that was meant for his wife, sacked me, then asked for it back.

By the time I turned up at a friend’s wedding, unemployed and convinced my degree had been a total waste of time, I found myself sat next to a Scot. Meeting another Scot in the wild can go one of two ways for me. I sound distinctly English and my parents are Tories, which tend to be two things that rub Scots up the wrong way. This man and I, however, had history. Derek was from Ayrshire and was the head of Entertainment Development at the BBC. He told me that my grandfather had been his MP when he was a child, during a teacher’s strike. ‘You’re the reason I can’t read or count,’ he said, narrowing his eyes before erupting into laughter. ‘I’m going to get you a job.’ True to his word, Derek called me a couple of days later to ask if I had any experience as a runner on my CV.

‘I did a couple of days on shoots when I first graduated,’ I lied. I started that week.

When I arrived at the BBC, everyone was aware that I was the boss’s pet. I tried to hold my privilege close to my chest but I hadn’t a hope. On my first day, Derek announced to the office that his new assistant was ‘so posh her grandfather signs the banknotes in Scotland’. I didn’t take the job very seriously because I didn’t take myself very seriously. And how could I when a producer asked me one Friday afternoon if I could shoot that weekend and I said, ‘Yes, my father has an estate in Scotland.’ He said, ‘I meant, can you use a camera?’

The novelty of working at Television Centre never wore off. Its donut shape meant I could rollerblade from my office to where they used to film Top of the Pops. My immediate superior was the glorious Nickie from Birkenhead, a vegetarian who rarely ate vegetables and subsisted on a diet of chips and pink wine. She was perpetually furious, smoked like a chimney and, like me, was going to be a writer. ‘I was once asked to write an episode of Miranda,’ she said.

I was immediately obsessed with her. Together, it was our job to read unsolicited TV ideas sent in from the public and reply with why they were never going to get made. Someone had once written in with the idea for The Weakest Link, so we considered each idea seriously, even Dale’s Bales, a show where Dale Winton rated the nation’s haybales out of ten, and The Only Way is Gareth, a show in which Gareth Gates and Gareth Southgate were chained together in a room until one of them either surrendered or died.

I wasn’t expected to do any writing, so instead I spent most of my time with Nickie, smoking in the Blue Peter garden by Shep’s grave. I leaned into my role as office jester, beginning a relentless campaign to be put on the TV. As soon as I got my hands on a BBC email address, I got to spamming. I would email casting teams, comedy commissioners and well-placed co-ordinators asking to buy them coffee and pick their brains. I had written two sitcom pilots. One was called Totty, based on the bad behaviour of myself and my schoolfriends, and the other was called Me and My Housemate, Sue, which was based on a period where my friend’s mum moved into our flatshare after a divorce, so she could get herself back on the dating scene.

I showed them to anyone who would read them, even getting as far as a meeting with someone at BBC Glasgow. I cold-emailed agents, tapped up every contact I could fathom, but everyone was saying the same thing: perform your material first; take a show to Edinburgh; show us what you can do. I was terrified at that thought, so instead I auditioned for reality TV shows, once carrying a plastic shotgun across Hampstead Heath for a show called Kookyville. I even appeared in the pilot for a BBC version of what would become Gogglebox. I consider it my luckiest break that none of these shows worked out.

I left the BBC when Derek did, no doubt to the relief of everybody there. I was now a development researcher for factual shows, but I couldn’t shake the feeling that I was halfway up a ladder I didn’t want to climb.

This was how I found myself, one Friday afternoon, secretly writing a comedy show at work that I was planning to take to the Edinburgh Festival.

‘Bella,’ said my boss, Faye, over the top of her computer. ‘Are you busy?’

She knew I wasn’t busy. We’d been auditioning potential MasterChef contestants in the office and I’d elected myself as taster. I made a habit of electing myself as anything to do with being on telly, just in case I was ‘discovered’ by one of the office execs, and had spent the last twenty minutes loudly parlaying my inexpert opinion on a contestant’s biryani. Last week the head of the company asked Faye if she’d hired me solely as her personal entertainer. I would like to point out that I entertained everyone; I was a job-lot jester that everyone could enjoy. And I wasn’t terrible at my job, just easily distracted.