YouTube is 20 years old, meet first Cork stars to go viral on it

When you’re 22 years old and a happy-go-lucky student, being filmed running around Cork city in just red trunks seems like a gas idea.

Nineteen years on, and Paul Crossan laughs as he contemplates having to tell his two young children one day soon that daddy was a hilarious viral sensation back when that phrase had barely been invented.

Paul was the star of a YouTube video entitled ‘Baywatch Cork’ in 2006, just a year after the website launched. The video-watching site has since become an internet behemoth and is 20 years old this month, and many Corkonians have gone viral on it - but Paul and the director of that video, Nick Condon, were the very first.

“Pioneers,” Paul chuckles, as he reminisces about the three-minute film that had 110,000 views, and people stopping him in the street who recognised him.

It showed the then computer science student at UCC doing his best David Hasselhoff impression to the theme tune of the popular 1980s show Baywatch, running around a distinctly wet and wintery Cork city wearing nothing but red trunks, sunglasses, socks and trainers.

From the Clarion Hotel to Merchant's Quay, Paul sprints past stunned onlookers wrapped up in their winter woollies. He makes his way through Bishop Lucey Park, taking a quick dip in the fountain and, realising there are no casualties, moves on to the South Mall, throwing in a few cheesy grins and slow-motion strides for good measure.

The footage is cleverly edited by Nick, making the best of Cork’s landmarks. “It’s like a time capsule of what the city was like in 2006,” says Paul, who is now a software developer and married father-of-two, aged six and eight, living in Ballinlough.

The video can still be seen on YouTube, and Paul laughs when I put it to him that he will have to show his kids some day, before they stumble on it themselves. “My wife saw it and told me, ‘What were you at?’” he says. “I can’t believe it was nearly 20 years ago now.” 

Like Paul, director Nick also eschewed a career in film after becoming a viral sensation.

He has his own business in digital software now on South Mall, but in 2006 was on a film course in Kinsale College of Further Education, where he lived. The video was part of it, and Nick had no hesitation asking his long-time friend Paul to be its star.

The Baywatch idea came about while they were in Tony’s Bistro in North Main Street one day. “Nick sprang it on me, and I was game ball, I said, let’s go for it,” recalls Paul.

The film was recorded on a DVD and their friend, Tony ‘Sparks’ McCarthy, put it on the then-fledgling YouTube channel, where it quickly grew legs, and became popular among Cork’s student population.

“The video became the saved page on students’ Bebo sites,” says Paul, referring to a long-gone forerunner to social media sites like Facebook.

Nick, a married father-of-three who now lives in Bishopstown, says he knew the video was big when he saw it one night on the screen in Fast Eddie’s pub. He had help on it from two people, Frank and Max, in the Cork Film Centre.

Nick and Paul are still good friends and regularly meet up for coffees.

Their video ends with Paul buying a copy of the then Evening Echo from Echo Boy Dave Hogan on Oliver Plunkett Street and strolling off into the night.

In 2006, The Echo interviewed Nick and Paul about the film’s success

“It’s amazing - you can post something online and it just takes off,” Nick said. “I decided it might be funny to put a Cork slant on Baywatch. I just had to find someone with no shame who didn’t mind running around in a pair of shorts in the middle of winter. I knew Paul would go for it.”

Paul said his only stipulation was he had to keep his feet warm: “I was going to run in my bare feet but we knew I wouldn’t be able to go as fast, it actually looks even funnier with just the shorts, socks and trainers.

“When we were making it, I kept bumping into people I knew. They had to do a double take - they thought they were imagining it - but I just kept running. The funniest thing was people’s faces when I ran past, they didn’t know what was going on.”

Nick explained: “I wanted it to be pure Cork, everything people associate with Cork - the peace park, the River Lee, and when people think of Cork, they think of the Evening Echo so I had to put it in there somewhere. It seemed like the best way to end it.”.

In that 2006 interview, Paul spoke of his first brush with fame.

“My sister was in Melbourne, and somebody sent her a link to the video by e-mail. So she starts watching it and nearly fell off the chair when she realised it was me. It was mad to think of people so far away looking at it. She thought it was hilarious.”.

Type ‘Baywatch Cork’ into the search bar at youtube.comtarget="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer"> to see it. It can be viewed here also. 

The site was launched on February 14, 2005, by three former employees of PayPal. One of them, Jawed Karim, put the first video up, ‘Me at the Zoo’.

It is now the world’s second most visited website, behind Google, which now owns it. Its average spends more than 20 minutes on the site - far longer than on any other in the world’s top 50.

An estimated 14 billion videos have been ed to it in the last 20 years, a number that increases by 3.7 million every day. It’s reckoned more than 500 hours of videos are ed to the site every minute.

The most-viewed YouTube video is ‘Baby Shark Dance’ with 14.77 billion hits - the equivalent of almost everyone on the planet seeing it twice.

The most popular Cork video on it is a flash mob performance of the song Mr Blue Sky in Cork city in 2009, with a staggering 4.3 million views.

A then two-year-old girl from Greenmount in Cork, Ella O’Brien, went viral with her version of the Justin Bieber hit, Baby, in 2011, which amassed 3.3 million views.

The Cork band Crystal Swing owe their success to YouTube, and their hit He Drinks Tequila was seen by 1.1 million people, catapulting them to global fame.

Other popular Cork videos in the past 20 years have included a Leeside-flavoured parody of Jay Z hit Empire State Of Mind, by radio presenter Jim Jim Nugent, with 137,000 views, and a song by Natural Gas about Queen Elizabeth’s visit to Cork, Come Up To Gurrane Lizzy Windsor, with 102,000 views.

Cork School of Music graduates, Colm O’Regan, Brendan O’Connor and Patrick O’Connor, became overnight sensations when they played Flight Of The Bumblebees on 101 empty beer bottles. The YouTube clip generated more than 1.3 million views and was shown on The Jay Leno Show in the US.

A Kanturk man became a YouTube hit after swimming in a pothole to highlight the state of the roads. Liam Keane’s exploits generated more than a quarter of a million views but earned him a rebuke by Cork County Council, who complained to gardaí.