A Chippy Tea, a Tumble and 27 Million Views

Some guests come into the studio and you know straight away you’re going to enjoy the next quarter of an hour. Rebecca Cooke is one of those people.

Rebecca is from Warrington, and she’s the face behind Explore With The Cookes, a family account with around 18,000 followers.

It’s full of days out, reviews and the general happy chaos of family life. I’ve bumped into her at a few events, and I’ll be honest, she gets invited to just as many as we do here at MIX56. Sometimes more.

But I didn’t only want to talk about days out. I wanted to talk about that video.

From At Home With The Cookes to Explore With The Cookes

The account started in 2020, “just for a bit of fun”, as Rebecca put it. Back then it was called At Home With The Cookes and was mostly about home and DIY. As the family started doing more and sharing more, it turned into days out, travel and experiences, so the name changed too.

It’s Rebecca, her husband and their two boys, aged fifteen and six. Yes, that’s a big age gap. A couple of nieces pop up now and then as well, which explains why I sometimes look at a post and think, “Hang on, who’s that?”

Rebecca told me she’s always been a big reader and writer of online reviews. The videos grew out of that. A nice bonus is that the boys love watching the old ones back.

Is Being an Influencer a Showbiz Lifestyle?

I had to ask, because I think a lot of mums and dads listening picture influencers rolling in money. Rebecca laughed. “It’s not like that at all.”

At her level, there’s very little money in it. The invites are great, but you still pay to get there, and you still pay for food and drink once you arrive. Then there’s the editing. A quick talk-to-camera video takes her about an hour.

A full day out can mean hundreds of clips on her phone, and she keeps going back over them to find the funniest moments and the most useful bits of information. Most of that work is unpaid.

Her dream is to earn enough from it to spend more time with the family. That sounds fair enough to me.

The Fall Down the Stairs

So here’s the video that went everywhere.

About six weeks before she posted it, the family had come home late from football with a chippy tea. They were eating off their knees in the living room with the telly on and Rebecca’s mum round. Nothing fancy. The house hasn’t got a dining room.

Her youngest, still in his full football kit, nipped upstairs to the bathroom. On his way back down he tripped at the top, bounced off the wall, went over on his ankle and tumbled to the bottom.

“It was not funny at all in that moment,” Rebecca said. “I was petrified.”

Then came the relief, because he’d landed on his feet. He was standing at the bottom of the stairs before Rebecca had even got out of her recliner, with the footrest still up.

Her husband wasn’t home. When he watched the footage later, he was in stitches.

So were his mates, and they all told her to post it. She held off for six weeks because she knew it would bring backlash.

Then one Friday night, at about 10 o’clock, she thought, “Sod it,” and posted it.

On TikTok it got a million views in an hour, and then TikTok took it down after an automatic check.

On Instagram it grew more slowly at first, then it reached around 20 million views within 24 hours. When we spoke, it was on 27 million.

The Comments: Banisters, Chips and Gran

The comments came in from every direction.

The banister. There isn’t one, and there never has been in the 15 years they’ve lived there. When the kids were small they went up on their hands and knees and came down on their bums. Rebecca says no banister would have stopped that fall anyway.

The chips. People couldn’t believe she didn’t put her food down. As Rebecca explained, the tray was on her knee and she had nowhere to put it. “My thoughts weren’t ‘Where do I put this food?’ It was ‘Oh my God, is my child okay?'”

Her mum. From where she was sitting, Rebecca’s mum couldn’t see the stairs. All she heard was Rebecca screaming. By the time she looked, her grandson was standing up, perfectly fine. So her reaction on the video was basically “Shut up, he’s fine,” and she got a bit of a bashing online too.

Then there were the snobby ones. I’ll admit I teased Rebecca on air with “So are you a bit common?” I said it because she’d had so many comments along those lines.

Her reply was perfect: “Can somebody that works hard not have a chippy tea?” Quite right.

There’s nothing wrong with a chippy tea.

How to Handle Negative Comments Online

This is the part I really wanted to share, because I think Rebecca handled it brilliantly.

She replies to some comments. She doesn’t argue, she just gets her point across calmly. She has also made follow-up videos answering a few of them, hoping they might make people think twice before typing something nasty.

As for the rest, she shrugs them off. “A lot of the comments really do make me laugh,” she told me. “I’m not gonna let somebody sat there making negative comments bring me down.”

What does worry her a little is her children seeing the horrible ones, or her family thinking the comments are upsetting her. They aren’t.

What I saw was a family who stuck together, laughed at a funny moment and dealt with some ridiculous comments in a calm, professional way. Honestly, a few politicians and PR people could learn from Rebecca.

Follow Explore With The Cookes

You’ll find Rebecca and the family as @explore_with_the_cookes on every major social platform, including Instagram and TikTok.

Give them a follow. Rebecca has promised to come back and tell us about their travels, and I’ll hold her to that.

Phil In The Morning is on Cheshire’s Mix 56, Monday to Thursday, 10am to 12 midday