Last month a rather unusual script arrived in my inbox.
Web video producers Kornhaber Brown in New York were looking for a narrator to voice a web video and having found me via Google, they chose me. Made with educating teenagers in mind, but also for their own amusement and everyone else’s, Eric Brown of (KB) explains: “Every once in a while at Kornhaber Brown, we make something for ourselves. We have a project called “KB Creative Lab”, where we assign a small budget to make creative or experimental videos.”
The script for the video took some vaguely accurate statistics from a legitimate source about sex and compared them with what you might see (should you choose to go looking) in a porn film. Apparently there’s a lot of porn on the internet. So I’m told.
To illustrate this visually, they employed foodstuffs in ways I’d never have though possible. Imaginatively and creatively.
The script also included some, ahem, fruity language. And I understood immediately why they chose a a female British narrator. There’s something shocking and slightly wrong about this kind of language spoken in a matter of fact manner by, to borrow a description from the video’s YouTube comments, a “proper lady”. Imagine a sex education lesson from Mary Poppins. Stop sniggering at the back.
There was clearly more to making this video than doing it for fun, of course. Should the video catch on and go viral, not only would it be talked about worldwide, but it certainly wouldn’t do Kornhaber Brown any harm. It could generate a lot of new business for very little cost. A fun gamble that might pay off hugely.
It did catch on. It did go viral.
Within 24 hours of the video being posted on YouTube on a Monday afternoon it had half a million hits. It added a million a day until the weekend. As of today, it’s had 10.1 million views and it’s still going up. It’s almost had as many people view it as watched the Downton Abbey Christmas Special.
Now there’s a mashup I wouldn’t mind seeing…
Here’s the video, “Porn Sex Vs Real Sex: The Differences Explained Using Food”. Visually, it’s pretty harmless, but accompanied by my narration it’s definitely Not Suitable For Work, Children or the Easily Startled. It contains VERY adult language. And you might well think twice about what you do with chocolate spread in future.