Spudman defends bitter allegations his baked potato empire is dividing town

BirminghamWorld

Tiktok sensation Spudman has won a fight to remain on his pitch after a council u-turned on their decision to move him - to make way for a flowerbed.

Transcript

00:00Well I'm having

00:02Anything else?

00:03No butter on the other one

00:04Yeah

00:05Cheese and...

00:06Kerry and Hannah from Mansfield

00:09It took us an hour and ten minutes to get here

00:12Juicy

00:14No

00:19Need a bag

00:20Yes please

00:21Find out from TikTok where Tater Man is

00:24And I'm going to enjoy my dinner today from here

00:26Tuna please

00:27Cheese and tuna, no butter

00:30Been here 21 years

00:32In Tamworth

00:34Why did we get started on social media

00:37Came back after Covid

00:39And we needed to let people know we were here basically

00:41So it was

00:42How are we going to do this?

00:44One of my lads put TikTok in front of me

00:46We made a few videos

00:48And I think my second or third video got half a million views

00:51And it opened my eyes to the power of TikTok and social media

00:55And never looked back really

00:57We posted every day

00:59You know three, four, five videos every day on TikTok

01:02And we've grown this amazing following

01:04And then all of a sudden in October

01:08Video after video after video started going viral

01:12One of them nearly a hundred million views

01:14People genuinely see how much I enjoy my job

01:25And I love coming to work and I love serving the people at Tamworth

01:29Obviously our lovely jacket potatoes

01:35These are grown ten miles away

01:37Local farmer that we use

01:39We use a variety called Melody

01:41Really nice

01:42Really nice one

01:44What do we put on it?

01:46We've got beans, curry, chilli, minced beef, pulled pork, coleslaw, tuna mayo, sweet corn and cheese of course

01:56We like to support local farmers

02:07I grew up for Grandover as a farmer

02:11And so supporting local is essential to us as well

02:15It is nice to keep the money in the area

02:19So the free day was an idea I had six months ago

02:30Before we really went viral

02:33And it was a nice way to give back to the community

02:37Basically we just wanted to give everyone we possibly could

02:42A jacket potato for free

02:44It grew into a far bigger event than I ever thought it would

02:48We had queues of nearly four hours long at one point

02:51We served 2,200 potatoes in five hours

02:57Which is no little accomplishment

03:00I'm sure there's some kind of world record in there somewhere

03:03Amazing atmosphere

03:04We raised nearly £11,000 for kidney research

03:07This is charity very close to my heart

03:14I've been on dialysis for 12 years

03:16Three failed transplants

03:18So yeah kidney research is a big thing for me

03:21And it also brings so much trade to Tamworth

03:29Like yes we were giving away freebies

03:31But I spoke to the other food vendors

03:33And they were all busy

03:34And had really good days for the time of year

03:37So it was really nice to see Tamworth buzzing

03:40And lots of people coming in and spending their money

03:43And yeah it was good, it was fun times

03:46Hi I'm April, I heard about this through TikTok

03:49And we're from Telford

03:50And we came today to just give it a go

03:52I've got a jacket potato with tuna and cheese

03:54And we've probably only queued for about ten minutes to get it

04:03Hi we're from Birmingham, my name's Jason

04:05Hi I'm from Birmingham, my name's Sue

04:07I'm here to enjoy the lovely spud from Spudman

04:10I've got cheese and coleslaw

04:12And I've got pulled pork and cheese

04:14It's lovely

04:16You can use like that and win that

04:20You can use like that and win that

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