I'm a Royal Armouries Leeds museum curator who became a viral star from a silly video - now I can't stop saying 'slay!'
The Royal Armouries’ 65-year-old senior curator is taking his sudden viral fame in his stride.
Mark Murray-Flutter has been no stranger to speaking to crowds and promotion during his near-40 years at the Royal Armouries and, previously, The Tower of London but nothing could have prepared him for the media storm that he’s been at the heart of the last two weeks.
Mark has been approached on the bus and become synonymous with the term “Slay!” - even using it to sign off his emails - since a marketing video of him exploded online.
It started straight forward enough; with the media team working with Mark to produce a social media clip in which he shows viewers around the Armouries using language in the style of Gen-Z.
It meant describing dioramas as “lit”, warning of “negative aura points” for those who miss the gift shop and saying that the “original rizzler” King Henry VIII’s codpiece “hits different”. And it was an instant hit.
Following the last week of relentless interviews with national broadcasters as the video racked up ever more millions of views, we sat down with Martin and the museum’s communications officer behind the project, Katie Glover.
The fad of social media videos using a Gen-Z style script had already begun taking off, with clips from an 880-year-old B&B and electrical retailer Currys proving particularly popular, before the Royal Armouries set the benchmark.
Katie said that the group decided to enlist Mark to host the videos as he has “that deep, curatorial voice” and is one of the museum’s “most esteemed curators”.
She added: “I was concerned that we’d run out of time as we were quite late and these sort of trends tend to have a short lifespan.”
Mark said that he was happy to go along with the idea, adding: “I thought ‘why not?’ It sounds like good fun.
“I didn’t really know what I was getting in to. It felt like learning a new language.”
The original video was posted on the Friday and when Mark came back to work on the Monday he learned that over a million people had watched the clip.
“I was very, very surprised”, he said. “I was taken aback by the response but probably more so by the niceness of the comments. That really shook me because everyone talks about how dangerous social media can be and how awful it is and how negative it can be but this wasn’t.”
Things only got bigger from there, as Katie explained: “It snowballed from Tuesday with the press wanting to get in and interview Mark and then we published a second video on Thursday which has now hit a million views.
“I thought the video would slow down but it’s still gaining momentum and is now at eight million views. Every time I log on it seems we have another 200 comments, thousand followers and God knows how many likes.”
Since then the museum and Mark have received messages from people from the likes of Australia, the USA, Israel and South Africa saying how much they loved it and people have said that they will be swinging by the Armouries on their next visit to Leeds.
Mark, who moved from London in the mid-1990s to be one of the curatorial designers for the Armouries, said: “It’s extraordinary. It really is.”
Asked what he thinks has made it such a hit, he said: “I think the dichotomy in that it’s a mixture of the type of person I am - older person with a gravely voice - talking the language that is alien to my generation but it’s still understandable.
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“It’s good to not take yourself so seriously all the time and I think I come across like I know what I’m saying!”
But mostly it’s the sense of fun and the hilarity that comes through the clips, as Katie explained: “I think people see museums as being a bit stuffy and not much fun but to see someone getting into the spirit like that breaks down that barrier.”
Mark took an instant affinity with the new phraseology as well, and said that he has been incorporating the terms into his daily life; signing off emails now with “Slay!”.
Katie said: “We had the museum director email us saying ‘Wow, congratulations’ and Mark just responded with ‘Slay’. Very simple but very effective.”
Looking forward, Katie says that they don’t want to keep recreating the same videos but that they hope to build on the momentum that the video has created by continuing to create content that brings new faces to the museum. And there will certainly be a place for Mark in there.