In depth

Honest comedy: TikTok’s viral town reviewer Phil Carr is turning his focus to attractions

A content creator who went viral producing tongue-in-cheek reviews of towns and businesses in the UK has turned his eye to the world of attractions. Planet Attractions spoke to Phil Carr about his social media rise and what’s next for the TikTok star

Phil Carr has become a huge success on TikTok, with the social media star drawing more than 42 million views on his channel

A content creator who went viral producing tongue-in-cheek reviews of towns and businesses in the UK has turned his eye to the world of attractions.

Phil Carr, also known as philc84 on social media platforms, started what turned out to be a meteoric rise in 2020 at the height of the global pandemic. Joining TikTok initially, Carr decided to start creating his own content, starting with jokes and pieces to camera, which soon saw him earning tens of thousands of views on each video.

Trying to create original content and in the midst of a strict lockdown thanks to Covid-19, Carr turned creative and started creating content such as guides to British supermarkets for Americans.

As his following grew, the content would continue to evolve to become fast-paced tongue-in-cheek reviews of towns across the country, also commenting on recent politics.

Not stopping there, Carr has taken his talents worldwide, travelling to locations not only across Britain, but to destinations including Germany for the recent Euro 2024 football tournament, Slovakia to see if it was cheaper to fly to Bratislava for a pint than it was to have a night out in London, and even an upcoming trip to explore the Arctic.

And what is the result of this work? A following of more than a million followers across multiple social media channels and more than 42 million likes on TikTok alone.



With soaring success and a personality that resonates with a large audience online, Carr has turned his eye to the world of attractions, increasing his focus on the sector. Planet Attractions spoke to Phil about growing his audience, his pivot to further focus on the world of attractions and what’s next as he continues to take the internet by storm.



“I'm Phil Carr. I'm 39. I primarily operate on TikTok, but my content goes out on other social channels such as Facebook. I create content about anything that interests me. So, attractions, towns, museums, social events. Anything in the zeitgeist that I feel other people may be missing on TikTok.

I feel very lucky that what I find interesting, other people seem to also find interesting. I got into it like most large TikTokers by lockdown. I started posting in 2020 at a time where building an audience was easy because everybody was stuck at home for nine or ten hours a day just scrolling on their phones.

TikTok was a new, exciting thing. I downloaded it, started watching it, and, out of boredom, I started doing the odd trend to put it up there. I started by telling a joke and it went out to a few thousand people. I thought that was quite surprising because I didn't have many followers at the time.

It started with really quite short stuff. Then as lockdown restrictions were eased, I knew that I wanted to film outside and I wanted to cover longer topics, but nothing was open.

I decided to do these town guides of the two or three towns that were within walking distance of my house. I also did reviews of supermarkets and, amazingly, people watched them. We came out of the Covid era and I came back into the real world with an audience.”



“All of the posts I do come from a place of love. If there's somewhere that I don't want to go, I genuinely don't go there.

The town guides are kind of the foundation of the account, although I've backed away from them a little bit because there are lots of other people who do them now. Early on, the town guides would consistently do up to three million views. But to me, they got a bit repetitive.

The problem with the town guides is that most towns in the UK are actually the same. House prices might be a bit different but they all have coffee shops, they've all got bookies, they've all got charity shops. I was going through these two lists of the 50 worst places to live in the country and the 50 best places to live in the country. My favourites were the towns that were on both the worst places and the best places to live lists, like Oxford. But it would be too easy for them to be repetitive. That’s when I decided that every town guide now needs to have a point to it.

Now with the guides, it's either because it's a big, interesting place with lots of history or lots of celebrities, maybe it has a hook like being named the happiest place in the country or the cheapest. You can do very well on TikTok, repeating the same joke again and again and again. But the longevity isn’t good, so I evolved that content.

I love doing pub reviews too. I love doing pub crawls, like the three poshest pubs in London or the pubs that are owned by celebrities. The attractions have been great too with museums and theme parks.”



“The one that I'm critical of is Iceland, which is like a long, long story. But when I posted these town reviews, people started asking about how many Lidls, Aldis and Wetherspoons there were, so I started putting them in there.

It’s quite funny because if you do a guide to Didcot or something like that, someone up in Sheffield might not have any idea about Didcot at all. Whereas if you tell people how many branches of Lidl there are, how many branches of Aldi, how many Icelands there are and how many Wetherspoons, people can then immediately get a gauge on how big the place is.

I used to add other things like Waitrose, and bingo halls, but it was getting too clumsy. So I just tightened it down to the four that people liked.”



“They're the best-performing videos. You're effectively telling a story and being creative around the true story. With the town guides, to get them out to the length I wanted them to be, I had to make some of them so surreal.

With an event or an attraction, I have the scaffolding of a story. With some of the towns, I'd just have a market square with a couple of coffee shops on it and a Wikipedia page saying nothing's ever happened there. So what I had to do was go around looking at things like who made the drains and hoping that someone fell in the canal while fishing while I was walking past. If none of that happened, I would then have to really let my imagination run wild.

With attractions, you're telling the story of you being there and you're getting the jokes in. People, people join you for the story of your day out but they come back to you because you deliver some comedy. It's an exaggerated true account of what I've been through with the one-liners in there.”



“I base everything on price, so it’s always the big factor. The country is in a tough place at the moment and if you're a family of four or five, it gets very expensive.

The reason why I would absolutely hammer, say, Madame Tussauds, was because they would charge so much to go in and it's overly crowded all the time. It's huge, it's busy and it's not that exciting. That as an example is something I genuinely thought was quite a bad product for the price you pay. If it had been a fiver or a tenner, I wouldn't have. Same with Cadbury World, which is quite expensive for what you get in return.

Everything is through the vision of price and how much it would cost a family to do something. It’s not all bad of course. A positive example is Horizon 22 in London - a viewing gallery at the top of 22 Bishopsgate. It's completely free. You've got to reserve a ticket to go, but it's free and there's no gift shop, which is important for parents. There's a little coffee shop up the top there, which was put in by the demand of the customers, apparently. But you go up there and it's the tallest viewing gallery in London. It absolutely smashes the London Eye, smashes the Shard. So I absolutely heap the praise on that because it's there, it's free.

If you go take your family to somewhere like London, there is an hour you can fill with something the kids will love. So it's always a case of my experience versus the price.

Normally if I enjoy something, I really get quite excited. If I don't enjoy something, I normally come across a bit more grumpy. When I was at Thorpe Park for the launch of Hyperia and we had the whole park to ourselves, that was me genuinely buzzing. I did a piece to camera saying this is one of the best things I've been to because to be there with the sun setting and just being able to walk onto the rides, was absolutely incredible.”



“There are things that I think are worth covering, so I did something on Tufton Street because I'm aware that I've got an audience that is kind of politically interested, but maybe not full-on, politically engaged. Then there are other things where I just get the idea.

As an example, a family friend had passed away. They were very, very old and I was chatting to my mum about it, and she said the funeral was going to cost whatever. And I was like, ‘REALLY’? This is how much a funeral costs? And then she said, yeah, because she wants to be buried and being buried costs £2,500 down by me. Because of that conversation, I thought ‘what's the most expensive grave in the country?’ I did the research on that, which evolved into a post. But you do it in a light-hearted manner, of course.

I also do due diligence on my posts. I don't do anything on small businesses unless I know I'm going to be positive and they're in on it. I would never go and be negative about an independent paintball centre in the Midlands or something like that. If I'm going to be negative about this, I think what's the actual impact?”



“An absolutely underrated one for anyone interested is the National Coal Mining Museum. It's free to go to. You can pay £3 to go down into a coal mine with an ex-coal miner. It's mind-blowing, scary, interesting and emotional because of how dangerous a job it was. You're actually in a coal mine wearing the proper equipment while an ex-miner tells you what they used to do for a job while you're down there. It's just brilliant.

Nearby to that is Yorkshire Sculpture Park, which I loved. It's just a beautiful part of the country with these amazing sculptures.

Hyperia with Thorpe Park is right up there. There are a lot of very, very good rides there now. I'm not an absolute rollercoaster enthusiast but that was a great experience.”



“Definitely guerrilla style. I get invited to maybe five or ten PR events in and around London every month and I say no to all of them. Hyperia was an exception because I really just wanted to go on the ride and I didn't want to queue all day to do it. I thought it would make a fun post as well. I thought people would want to watch it, which luckily they did.

I get invited to places a lot, and I politely decline when they open. But if I like the idea of it, I then put it on my list and I go a few weeks after it's opened up and do it as a general visitor.

As far as brand deals and paid partnerships go, I do the absolute minimum amount to keep the show on the road and keep the whole thing financially feasible. I only do a paid partnership with something that I fully back, so you won't hear me praising Tussauds any time soon.”



“Authenticity is everything. Gen Z is so smart to it. Authenticity has to be everything. There's absolutely no point selling yourself out for a lot of money on a post that isn't authentic. People realise it and then people will slowly disengage from you.”



‘I want to keep making the posts bigger and longer. I'm in a position where I might spend a day or two days going to a location. I went to the most remote pub in the country. That was two days to make one three-minute post. I like the idea of doing much bigger, bolder things like that. So maybe not the most remote pub in the country, but the most remote pub in Europe.

I want to do everything that I've been doing to establish myself, but instead of the happiest town in the country, maybe I want to visit the happiest town in the world, that would be the dream.

As you get more access, I want to pick the bits that people will be interested in, but most people don't know about. So it's increased access and increased post size.”