Back in 2006 my future wife, Lenny White, and I had become slightly famous for making an online cooking show called Crash Test Kitchen. Getting an email from Time magazine requesting a biography and a photo shoot was no huge surprise – we’d already had a few brief mentions in the red-bordered mag by then.
I can confirm – as Time has stated after Donald Trump claimed he turned down the accolade – that it is not their approach to reveal you’re going to be Person of the Year. All they said was they were doing some articles on the phenomenon of “user-generated content” on the web, and we were one of their case studies.
Lenny and I were on holiday in Australia for Christmas, and arranged with Time to meet a photographer at a friend’s house in Queensland. Angie dandled our infant daughter off to the side of the kitchen while we pretended to cook something for the camera.
We thought no more of it and continued on our holiday until another friend, Kellie, heard about Time Magazine’s “Person of the Year is YOU” issue – and the penny dropped.
A storm of publicity followed – two radio interviews, a mention in our hometown newspaper, and we got some free recipe books from a publisher (discussions about them commissioning our memoir petered out). We were namechecked in the Complete Idiot’s Guide to Videoblogging, and a fan emailed us after spotting us out and about in Cambridge. Someone at my new job in the Guardian recognised me as well. We went on Market Kitchen, where Tom Parker Bowles served us undercooked liver and they had to do a reshoot; and a BBC show called Kill It Cook It Eat It, where we had to watch calves being slaughtered and then argue with vegetarians about veal.
At some point we went into a small-town newsagency to buy up all available copies of “our” Time issue. Another customer, an old codger, chided us, saying “that one’s all full of crap about computers and the internet”. Lenny opened to our page, pointed to the picture of herself and said “Well who’s THIS in here then?” The man’s expression changed to a mixture of confusion, awe and embarrassment as he glanced back and forth between the page and Lenny’s face. “It’s YOU. How did YOU get in there?”
From there, though, our star faded. We kept making the show for a while, but the distraction of a steady wage and the demands of child-rearing intervened. We were more than happy to hand the baton to Vladimir Putin in 2007.
I don’t expect that I will ever be Person of the Year again – like Trump I am in the once-only club – or recapture that level of global stardom. A Nobel prize for literature for the Guardian Morning Briefing would be a bit of a stretch. And I am still far from a physics Nobel, as my theory on the quantum entanglement of socks in the tumble dryer (when one is in a “found” state, the laws of the universe dictate that the other must be “lost”) seems unlikely to pass peer review.
There’s always politics though I guess … and Lenny and I must get the magazine framed. Unlike those ones in Trump’s golf club, ours is not a fake.
• “Lenny” and “Waz” were not Time’s only 2006 persons of the year – there were some other bloggers and whatnot in there as well
