Tickled

Overview

Faces strained and bright Adidas gear donned, men pile on top of each other, roll around and tickle each other into exhaustion. These men are all called athletes. This is a sport. A very niche, very non-official sport known as competitive endurance tickling.

The video of the men tickling each other continues with much of the same repeated again and again. Yet what seems like a harmless piece of viral internet debris, the kind of video that you watch for a few minutes while scrolling down your Facebook feed, is only the surface of an intricate confidence scam which has destroyed possibly hundreds or more lives: or what I'd like to call the Nigerian email scam of 2016.

David Farrier, the beloved face of TV3 pop culture journalism and co-director Dylan Reeve, happened upon one of the biggest stories of their lives after randomly stumbling upon a video of the aforementioned sport while having the usual scroll around the internet. Being the journalist that Farrier is, he dug a little bit deeper and tried to get in touch with the organisers of the event to get an interview for what looks like a good fluff piece to round off the 6 o'clock news. In return, Farrier gets flooded with emails from the organisers questioning his sexuality, a couple of letters from a US lawyer threatening to sue him and three representatives from the USA visit Farrier in New Zealand to get him to desist from investigating further.

Obviously he doesn't.

Tickled crawls into and exposes the dark underbelly of the B-grade tickling fetish film industry. It's said that the tickling fetish is all about the pleasure of controlling the other person absolutely and forcing them into submission ("a step down from torture"), but in the process of making the documentary, everyone on and off-screen are slowly being controlled and forced to submit to an evasive entity/entities hidden somewhere inside the internet - the one/s orchestrating the entire tickle fetish video scene. (Some manipulation attempts have even continued post-production.)

Equally disarmingly funny as it is disturbing, Tickled may sound like a ridiculous fictional script, but it's the strangest truth that's been told on a New Zealand screen in a while. It's well worth a watch.