The clock is tik-ing

Do you fear the advance of Tiktok? I don’t mean the general march of time, or the inevitability of death, but something far more insidious. Over the past few years, the Chinese video-sharing app Tiktok has crept from something only teenagers do, so adults needn’t expel energy trying to understand it – like wearing bumbags diagonally, or knowing what being a ‘Karen’ is – to ‘Oh God, am I going to get cancelled if I don’t join it?’ As if to endow it with a hallmark of respectability, earlier this month Dame Judi Dench claimed that making Tiktoks in quarantine ‘saved my life’. She isn’t the only fully fledged celebrity adult on there, either. So what are you waiting for? The hands of time and all that.

DAME JUDI DENCH

The 85-year-old national treasure has performed on many platforms – stage, radio, small screen, big screen – and now, thanks to her 23-year-old grandson, Sam, she’s dancing in the garden on Tiktok. The video clips only tend to last for 10 or 15 seconds, but that’s considerably more screen time than Dench had in Shakespeare in Love, and she still won the Academy Award for that. So Oscars 2021, here she comes. It’s not as if any other films have been released.

BRITNEY SPEARS

Anything goes on Tiktok, which is lucky for Britney Spears, now 38. Earlier in the year she filmed a video admitting she once burnt down her gym with candles, and last week posted a clip in which she expressed gratitude for a bouquet of flowers, then just slowly walked back and forth across the camera for 30 seconds. It was watched by 15 million people. Apparently that’s how you get a second career in 2020: accidental arson and strange thank-you messages. Granted, it’s much less stressful than Spears’s first one.

GORDON RAMSAY

Using Tiktok, the great cookery swear bear has reinvented himself as some sort of fun, Dad-dancing joker, rather than a sociopath with a whisk, and now has his own account and a follower-number the size of Wales. In March he danced and lip-synched with his 18-year-old daughter, Tilly, to the rap lyrics, ‘Juice, sauce, little bit of dressing/ice, wrist, little bit of flexing.’ That recipe’s normally an £85 starter in his restaurants.

REESE WITHERSPOON

As if trying to create the world’s least appealing content for a teenage audience, Witherspoon’s recent posts have included her green smoothie recipe – ‘Two heads of romaine lettuce, one pear, one apple, an entire lemon, coconut water – you can add anything!’ Anything? Like… some gin?

MARIAH CAREY

‘Welcome to the adventures of Mimi, dahhlings!’ cries the Tiktok biography of 50-yearold Mariah Carey. So let’s see: there she is swimming with dolphins (above)… There she is working out on a cross trainer in gloves, sunglasses and a Gucci tracksuit… There she is deciding the inside of her fridge has the best selfie lighting in the house. It’s the adventures of Mimi, all right. Or me, me, me, anyway.

VICTORIA BECKHAM

She won’t ever perform again, Posh has said, but it turns out she meant with the Spice Girls. Earlier this year, Beckham danced to Spice Up Your Life on Tiktok in the kitchen of her family home with her 17-year-old son, Romeo, as somebody awkwardly tried to cook in the background. It was either good hearty fun, or the world’s most passive-aggressive way of telling a private chef to add a bit more seasoning this time.