The time I made a Pornhub video
Did you ever go to a rugby game and end up making a video that got uploaded to Pornhub? I suspect I might be in the minority of those that did.
It was Sunday 19th January 2020. A few short weeks before the world began to take a bit more notice of a news story that was confined to China at that time, Wigan were playing a pre-season game against Leeds Rhinos as part of Liam Farrell’s testimonial year. This was around 8 months before I moved to Wigan and I had travelled to the game from Deeside with a friend, Mike, and was meeting two further friends in Wigan. One was an old friend of ours Chudds, with whom I attended my first ever Wigan rugby game over 20 years previously. The other was someone that I hadn’t yet met. His name is Jaw (actually spelt ‘Joe’). They’re both from Cumbria.
January afternoons in Wigan can be somewhat on the chilly side. It doesn’t prevent many of the natives (myself included) from wearing shorts and this day was no exception. Mike and I decided that we would shelter from the elements and wait for the others in one of the pubs closest to Wigan North Western train station. When Chudds and Jaw arrived after the inevitable delay on the West Coast Mainline it left very little time to get to the ground and so we decided to get a taxi. All went smoothly. We made kick off and even had time to grab further liquid refreshments on the way to our seats. As for the game, I can’t remember much but I do recall Leeds winning. The details aren’t particularly important to this tale.
After the game, we found ourselves in Wigan Central, a pub that Mike and I had been in earlier. It’s known to win awards for the selection of beer but on this occasion it was their selection of snacks that grabbed my attention. They had pies, which is nothing unusual for a Wigan pub. They also had other savoury snack options that are found in most pubs, like crisps, nuts, pork scratchings etc. However, we were especially impressed that they had the option of not only a brand of crisps (Fiddler’s) that claimed to be from Lancashire, but also that they offered a Lancashire Sauce flavour. When two Welshmen and two Cumbrians get together in an old Lancashire town we want the full tourist experience of Lancashire authenticity and so ordered a couple of packets of Fiddler’s Lancashire Sauce flavour crisps. In the time-honoured ritual, likely going back to the times of Jesus, we ripped the packets open completely and left them in the middle of the table so they could be shared. (I’m guessing about the Jesus thing. Though as he was Jewish it’s more likely he’d have been eating crisps than pork scratchings). We agreed that they were decent enough flavour crisps. In the ensuing conversation about our favourite crisp flavours, Jaw made a statement that changed the course of not only the afternoon, but possibly history.
“Yeah, they’re alright but they’re not a patch on XL crisps. They’re the best crisps you’ll find. Cheesy as fuck!”
It was an attention grabbing statement, especially as I wasn’t familiar with XL crisps despite Jaw describing in great detail the colour and design of the packets. It turns out that they’re a Scottish brand. Though they have made their way as far south as Cumbria, they just weren’t stocked in any of the places I frequented in north Wales. And yet when Jaw had described their cheesiness I knew that I just had to find some. After all, crisps with so much flavour are rare these days. I’m not one for subtlety of flavours. If I have crisps it tends to be Square crisps that are so chock full of flavour they might as well have an expletive in the description. I don’t want ‘Salt and Vinegar’ flavour. I want ‘Salt and Fucking Vinegar, Ya Bastards!!’ flavour where you end up tasting them for the remainder of the day, no matter how many times you brush your teeth.
In fact, this attitude to flavours has probably cost me any chance of winning Master Chef. Well, that and the fact I’m not much use at cooking anything more elaborate than an omelette. As an example of my attitude to flavour I don’t want something with ‘subtle tones of garlic if you close your eyes and concentrate for long enough’. If you’re giving me something that contains garlic I want to be a threat to any vampires within two miles of me for a month if I so much as hiccup.
Jaw was so astonished that I hadn’t sampled his preferred brand of crisps before that he seemed to find it offensive. So much so that he took my number and address and vowed to send some down to me. I’ve had promises made to me in pubs before that haven’t come to anything. Notably by the guy that once bet me £10,000 that Wales would never qualify for a major football tournament within his lifetime. I will only accept his death as an excuse for him not having paid me yet! But Jaw seemed different. He seemed genuine. To paraphrase Genesis (band, not Bible), “you can trust a man who works with his hands.”
The following week, a package arrived. I was expecting a solitary packet of crisps in a Jiffy envelope so I was a little bit shocked when a box arrived that you could comfortably house a Staffordshire bull terrier in. It turned out to be filled with XL crisps! It seems that Jaw isn’t the type of guy that does things by halves. I decided to make a recording of the moment I opened the box and sampled the crisps for the first time. After all, if they were as good as Jaw had insisted they were this would be a historic event! I struggled to open the box with one hand filming but persevered. I then opened the packet, drooling at the prospect. I sampled the crisps for the first time.
At this point it’s worth mentioning a Tweet that I’d seen some months earlier. It was in the aftermath of Ben Stokes’ match winning innings against Australia at Headingley in the third Ashes test of 2019. Stokes had tweeted something, to which somebody had responded to suggest that the innings was so good they had, “Just uploaded your innings to Pornhub”. I thought that was hilarious! It stuck in my mind as a phrase and I didn’t know if I would ever get to use it in context.
After sampling the crisps for the first time, it took a moment or two for the full cheesiness to hit me. When it did, I had to agree with Jaw – these were indeed “cheesy as fuck”. In fact, being a Scottish brand, I’m quite surprised that isn’t the flavour on the packet. That or “Cheesy Wee Bastards!”. Remembering the tweet, in my commentary on the video I mentioned that it would not be uploaded to Facebook, it would be uploaded to Pornhub instead!
You know when you say something in jest then realise you the have to follow through with it? Well, that was the situation I now found myself in. Having said that I’d do it, it was now a matter of honour that I would. (That’s possibly the first time that ‘honour’ has ever been used in relation to a story about Pornhub). To do so would involve me signing up for an account. Trust me when I say that the questions asked when doing so were unlike any other account I’d previously signed up for. When uploading the video, I then had to select some categories that it would be appropriate for to help users find it easier. I thought that may prove difficult as crisp consumption isn’t really what the site is renowned for, but I was then delighted to see that ‘Eating out’ was one relevant topic. As was ‘Oral’. And ‘Food fetish’! And so I feel I must apologise to anyone around that time that was browsing Pornhub in a moment of passionate solitude expecting to be entertained to the point of ejaculation by one of their specialist perversions only to be greeted by a video of me wolfing down a packet of cheese crisps. There was a boom in the use of pornographic websites a short time after my video was published. I presume it had more to do with the national lockdown than my appearance.
Further discomfort was caused when I realised that, in attempting to entertain others with the video, I had tweeted a link to it. When I did so I forgot that my Dad is on Twitter and follows me. My Dad is a lay reader for the Church In Wales and is genuinely supportive of everything I do, even when it has no interest to him. Had I corrupted a man of the cloth by sending him to a hardcore porn site? Had he then shared the details of this by sending the link around the parish? It would certainly be a surprise to some (not all) parishioners if my Dad had given them a link to Pornhub, excitedly telling them to “Check this video of my son out!!”
After a couple of months, Pornhub wrote to me. Not, as I first thought, to congratulate me and pay me royalties, but to advise me that I needed to become a proper member in order to leave the video on their site. In a move to be applauded, they were clamping down on things such as ‘revenge porn’, abuse and exploitation. Though why they had ever allowed those kind of things on their site in the first place is questionable. I’m not sure why they suddenly decided to revise their policies of what is and isn’t acceptable. I’m imagining that there was an outbreak of morality following the #MeToo movement and a growing number of subscribers were busy burping the worm only to get to the vinegar strokes and think, “that young lady is being exploited by that basketball team. I hope this won’t adversely affect her future.”
I decided that I didn’t really need to be a member of Pornhub so didn’t want to provide all the relevant documentation to upload videos. It would have been one thing to provide a utility bill just to allow the video to remain posted but another entirely to provide practically every single detail about myself, including a copy of my passport. I had questions, such as who would they share the information with? If I was flying to a country where the site is banned, would it flag up and mean that I was denied entry? Had that happened, from what I witnessed in the sign-up procedure, that would probably be the first time anyone associated with Pornhub had ever been denied entry before. And so the video has now been removed. I can only apologise to any disappointed crisp fetishists.
However, I have now found a copy of the video elsewhere and uploaded it to YouTube instead. You can view it here: https://youtu.be/Egk9AFCLvTs