A jacket potato seller has been dubbed the new 'Binley Mega Chippy' after becoming a global TikTok sensation attracting visitors from across the world.
Ben Newman - aka Spudman - has seen customers queuing for up to three hours to get their hands on his famous spuds in the quaint market town of Tamworth, Staffs.
People have been flocking from as far as the USA, Australia, New Zealand and Malaysia to his humble jacket potato van after his videos took the internet by storm.
The 39-year-old now sells up to 1,500 jackets a day priced between £4 to £5 each after racking up 2.6 million followers and 41.6 million likes on TikTok.
Dad-of-nine Ben says he has no idea how he became an unlikely tourist attraction for young people after originally joining TikTok to keep an eye on his children.
Ben Newman - aka Spudman - has seen customers queuing for up to three hours to get their hands on his famous spuds in the quaint market town of Tamworth, Staffs.
People have been flocking from as far as the USA, Australia, New Zealand and Malaysia to his humble jacket potato van after his videos took the internet by storm.
The 39-year-old now sells up to 1,500 jackets a day priced between £4 to £5 each after racking up 2.6 million followers and 41.6 million likes on TikTok.
Dad-of-nine Ben says he has no idea how he became an unlikely tourist attraction for young people after originally joining TikTok to keep an eye on his children.
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FunTranscript
00:00 I'm having...
00:02 Anything else?
00:03 No but I'm the other one.
00:04 Kerry, Hannah from Mansfield. It took us an hour and ten minutes to get here.
00:08 Farzat from TikTok where Peter Mann is and I'm going to enjoy my dinner today from here.
00:13 Been here 21 years in Tamworth. Came back after Covid and we needed to let people know we were here basically.
00:22 So it was, how are we going to do this? One of my lads put TikTok in front of me.
00:27 We made a few videos and I think my second or third video got half a million views.
00:32 And it opened my eyes to the power of TikTok and social media and never looked back really.
00:38 We posted every day, you know, three, four, five videos every day on TikTok and we've grown this amazing following.
00:46 And then all of a sudden in October, video after video after video started going viral.
00:51 One of them nearly 100 million views.
00:54 What do you enjoy doing?
00:58 People genuinely see how much I enjoy my job and I love coming to work and I love serving the people of Tamworth.
01:05 Obviously our lovely jacket potatoes. These are grown 10 miles away.
01:09 Local farmer that we use. We use a variety called Melody. Really nice.
01:14 We've got beans, curry, chilli, minced beef, pulled pork, coleslaw, tuna mayo, sweet corn and cheese, of course.
01:24 We like to support local farmers. I grew up for granddad was a farmer and so supporting local is, you know, essential to us as well.
01:34 It is nice to keep the money in the area.
01:38 The free day was an idea I had six months ago before we really went viral and it was a nice way to give back to the community.
01:46 Wanted to give everyone we possibly could a jacket potato for free.
01:51 It grew into a far bigger event than I ever thought it would.
01:55 We had queues of nearly four hours long at one point.
01:59 We serve 2,200 potatoes in five hours, which is no little accomplishment. I'm sure there's some kind of world record in there somewhere.
02:09 Amazing atmosphere. We raised nearly £11,000 for kidney research.
02:14 Charity very close to my heart. I've been on dialysis for 12 years and three failed transplants.
02:21 So yeah, kidney research is a big thing for me.
02:25 And it also brings so much trade to Tamworth.
02:29 Yes, we were giving away freebies, but I spoke to the other food vendors and they were all busy and had really good days for the time of year.
02:37 So it was really nice to see Tamworth buzzing and lots of people coming in and spending their money.
02:44 Yeah, it's good. It's fun times.
02:46 Hi, I'm April. I heard about this through TikTok and we're from Telford and we came up today to just give it a go.
02:52 I've got a jacket with tuna and cheese and we probably only queued for about 10 minutes to get it.
02:58 Hi, we're from Birmingham. My name's Jason.
03:02 Hi, I'm from Birmingham. My name's Sue. I'm here to enjoy the lovely spud from Spudman.
03:07 I've got cheese and coleslaw.
03:09 And I've got pulled pork and cheese. It's lovely.
03:12 play.
03:14 [BLANK_AUDIO]