How I became a British meme
A fake girlfriend, a televised meltdown, a ruined life
In 2016, I accidentally became a bit character in UK history.
I had bumbled my way onto a British reality show called Come Dine with Me, where four strangers take turns hosting, attending, and rating each other’s dinner parties, and the person with the highest score at the end of the week wins an extremely modest £1,000. Usually, the show is low-stakes—its version of “drama” is when someone sticks a whole whisk in their mouth. It’s the kind of trashy, easy-viewing TV you might watch while you’re recovering from having your appendix removed.
My episode was different. On the final day, when a contestant named Peter realized he had lost, he delivered a now-iconic denunciation of the winner and kicked the rest of us out of his house. The clip is routinely scrubbed from YouTube for copyright violations, but here’s a version that has lived on (I’m the guy in blue sitting sheepishly on the couch):
This is tame by American standards, of course, where our reality shows involve stripping people naked and dropping them in the woods. But for the Brits, this was as scandalous as the Queen showing cleavage. Peter’s blowup became national and international news. Bootleg versions of the episode racked up millions of views before being taken down. Voice actors, vintage shop employees, and precocious children posted their best Peter impressions, while enterprising Etsy sellers slapped his visage on coasters, t-shirts, spatulas, Christmas jumpers, doilies, and religious candles. Internet citizens turned his rant into an auto-tuned ballad, a ukulele ditty, and an honestly very catchy indie single.
Most memes die, but a few transcend. This one transcended. “You won, Jane” became a permanent part of British memetic vernacular, right up there with “Keep Calm and Carry On”, destined to be resurrected and remixed to fit whatever’s in the headlines. For instance, when covid struck, this appeared:
When England lost a soccer game:
When Keir Starmer became prime minister last year:
When Chappell Roan revealed the original title of her hit song “Good Luck, Babe!”:
If you went to the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in 2023, you could go see live actors reenact the whole Come Dine with Me debacle, with one caveat: “To avoid copyright infringement, we will recreate the episode using sock puppets”.1
Every generation casts down the memetic gods of their forefathers, and so I expect “You won, Jane” to eventually be displaced by Gen Z’s pantheon of rizz and skibidi toilet. But that hasn’t happened yet. Even to this day, although I no longer live in the UK, every once in a while I’ll see some stranger squinting at me, and they’ll walk over, and I’ll secretly be hoping that they’ll say “Hey, I read your blog” but instead they will say, “Hey, were you on that one episode of Come Dine with Me?”
I have resigned myself to the fact that, no matter what I do for the rest of my life, if I am remembered for anything at all, it will be the for the thirty seconds I spent sitting idly by while a man ruined his life on national television. I haven’t said much about the whole episode since then, for reasons that will become clear later. But now that we’re nearly 10 years out, it’s time to unburden myself of these secrets I’ve been carrying ever since. Because what they show on TV ain’t the whole story. It ain’t even close.