“There’s the money shot.” In 2015, those words can only mean one thing: people are crowding around a computer watching a cat playing a keyboard with yogurt on its head.
Comedian Susan Calman investigates the phenomenon of cat videos in this smirksomely-titled Radio 4 documentary. Pussy Galore indeed. Each day the British public shares nearly 4m cat-related photos and videos, according to Calman. Who are these people and why are they doing it?
It’s hard to examine the idea of cats as an internet sensation without actually showing videos of them indulging in their art, but Calman gives it a good go.
Grumpy Cat, a random cat on a keyboard, fluffy kittens – why are they so popular? Buzzfeed’s beastmaster Jack Shepherd ignores the fact that in the early days of the internet people used to use it for porn, claiming instead that they used it to upload photos of their cats on message boards. “The internet and cats have grown together,” he says.
Maybe we are hard-wired to love cute kittens, just as we are babies. While dogs try too hard to impress, cats aren’t so desperate. They’re cool. They don’t need your approval. Among the coolest is Henri the Existential Cat – his owner, Will Braden, pinpoints the power of cats on social media, recalling how when fans met Grumpy Cat they weren’t interested in anything other than getting a selfie with their furry hero. “If people don’t post it, it doesn’t exist,” he says, hitting the nail on the head about most things in life these days.
Calman herself has three “fur babies” and wants to make some cash out of them. She enlists the help of her “cat video focus group” to try to make these underperformers into superstars, but no amount of squashing a cat into a box, teaching them to play an instrument or securing merchandising deals helps. At 4am, she abandons the project.
The experiment is deliberately rubbish and the proliferation of cats on the internet remains a mystery, despite this documentary. Like cat videos, it is as much use as a big ball of fluff – but still a whole lot of fun.
