The teenage toffs going viral on TikTok
The video-sharing app has proved the perfect platform for viral spoofs, reports Alice Hall
Top private school fees may now cost £42,000 a year, but any parent worrying whether that’s money well spent can take heart from the latest employment opportunity opening itself up to pupils: TikTok influencer. The viral video-sharing app may be an enigma to anyone out of their teens, but has had more than a billion downloads worldwide, with big-name users raking in as much as £150,000 per 60-second post.
The private school kids of TikTok may be some way off that yet, but their short video clips offering insight into what life is – supposedly – like for today’s teenage toffs, have already racked up 430.5 million views, and counting.
The spoof videos, set to pop music, parody British private schools in all their glory – the more stereotypes squeezed in, the better. A quick scroll through the “privateschool” hashtag on TikTok reveals references to grassy cricket pitches, grouse shooting, and of course, glinting signet rings. Think St Trinian’s or Tom Brown’s School Days, reimagined for the digital generation.
At first glance, many videos echo those shared by the “Rich Kids of Instagram”, a website set up in 2012 to collate the Instagram posts of obnoxiously wealthy adolescents around the world. One #privateschool TikTok video, set to the backdrop of Kayne West’s rap song Gold Digger, trills “Private school check” – a popular trope on the app – before flashing short clips of AirPods, £50 notes and classrooms in castle turrets.
Unlike many of the gratuitous displays of wealth that have surfaced on social media over the last decade, however, self-parody is key.
Arguably one of the most popular accounts is the Schoffel Gang: a group of three gilet-clad 17-year-old boarders, who have amassed 53.2k followers since setting up their account in September last year. Kit Riley, 17 – who often goes by the name Tarquin in the videos – is one of the brains behind the account, which started off as a joke to “pass time in prep”, and has now gone viral.
“People have a set perception of private school – that it’s all hunting, shooting and everyone wearing Barbour coats,” says Riley. “We decided to parody this stereotype. There’s no one actually called Tarquin at school. We’re all from very different backgrounds, and we’re not stuck up or arrogant.”
It’s hard to translate into print, but one of their most popular videos, with over one million views, is shot in a school dormitory to the beat of rapper Slowthai’s track, Drug Dealer. A besuited boy with floppy hair asks “Tarquin” how he got so many gifts for Christmas before Kit spins round, beneath a caption reading “Daddy drives a”, to declare: “Range Rova”.
The parody doesn’t end with the video. The Schoffel Gang’s TikTok profile picture is their faces Photoshopped over an image from Lone Scherfig’s film, Riot Club – itself a remake of the 2010 play Posh, which depicted former-public school boys at Oxford University joining a secretive society, widely believed to be based on the Bullingdon Club. An enduring fascination with the lives of the “seven per cent” is nothing new.
In 2010, a comedy YouTube video called Gap Yah by Oxford graduate Matt Lacey went viral: depicting plummy, upper-middle-class, ex-public school-student Orlando, relaying his Third World escapades to a friend on the phone, each ending with the phrase: “…and then I just chundered everywhere.”
Al Berry, a social media strategist, says that while the Gap Yah video was “brilliantly observed,” the private school TikToks are “Gap Yah on steroids.”
So who’s watching? Although there’s a well-documented overseas’ fascination with British boarding schools, in reality, the videos are probably “not playing out to a wider audience than the people who are actually creating it,” Berry says.
This hasn’t stopped Riley being spotted by fans, but he insists the boys don’t think of themselves as “influencers”.
“We’re just teenagers focusing on our A-levels,” he says. “One of my subjects is music tech, so this platform has given me the confidence to spread my ideas.”