They are the couple who became pop stars and anti-poverty campaigners, fundraising for food banks with their songs about sausage rolls. Then came threats so extreme the anti-terror police stepped in …
By Emine Saner
Mon 4 Nov 2024 11.00 CET
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Amodern Christmas without a LadBaby charity single, some might say, is like sausage meat without the pastry, but it’s something we now have to adjust to. Between 2018 and 2022, Mark and Roxanne Hoyle, the husband-and-wife team behind the social media brand LadBaby, had the Christmas No 1 – for such things still matter – sewn up. With their fifth, they broke the record set by the Beatles. One year, they collaborated with Elton John and Ed Sheeran. Then last year, they decided they’d had enough. What had started as a joke, and a way to raise money for the food bank charity the Trussell Trust (now known as Trussell), had become more successful than they’d ever thought possible.
It also came with a backlash, after allegations spread online that the Hoyles were pocketing the money. They received a deluge of online abuse, threats in public and blackmail attempts. They were labelled grifters and, worse, Tories (in a 2019 Guardian interview, they had declined to say how they voted). Mark started experiencing panic attacks, something he still lives with. Now they’ve written a memoir, Our LadBaby Journey, detailing much of this, and it seems a bit of a cautionary tale – what happens when two ordinary people become online celebrities, and some silly Christmas songs about sausage rolls end with threats and the police involved.
When there was this narrative going around that we stole the money and profited from it, it was really difficult to take
Mark Hoyle
Writing the book, says Roxanne, was “like therapy, getting it out on paper”. It also made them realise what they had achieved, she says. They have built a brand with 13 million followers across several social media platforms, by posting funny videos of themselves. They have paying subscribers who join them live three times a week. They’ve written children’s and parenting books, created a game and do a podcast (we’re talking via video call, the couple in the attic room in their Nottingham house where they record it). As content creators, says Roxanne, it’s always about “what’s next, what’s next – and social media is so fast, I don’t think we ever really celebrated or took in how big it was”.
Mark and Roxanne Hoyle on the night they first met.
Mark and Roxanne Hoyle on the night they first met. Photograph: LadBaby
Mark, 37, started LadBaby in 2016 as a Facebook page. At the time, Roxanne, 40, was pregnant and Mark was working as a graphic designer in advertising. The first of his friends to become a father, he felt he wasn’t getting what he needed from the online parenting influencers. “I was like, I want to read the bloke that owns a chippy and has three kids, the everyday bloke that’s talking about being a dad. So I set up this blog, and I hoped to meet people like me.” The height of his ambition, he says, was to get noticed by a baby brand and get some free nappies out of it.
They were struggling financially. Roxanne had worked as an art director in advertising, but had given up work to look after their son because childcare costs were too high. But she had been the higher earner, and now they were trying to survive on Mark’s single salary. After all the bills had been paid, they budgeted £20 a week for food. “I’d go round Aldi with a calculator,” she says. Once, she accidentally went 70p over and couldn’t pay for her shopping; a man in the queue gave her a pound. Mark says it was very difficult to deal with at the time. He turns to his wife. “I don’t think I truly shared with you how it made me feel, because I didn’t want it to look like I wasn’t coping. But I was terrified. I was the only one bringing the money, and it wasn’t enough.” Laughter, he says, was vital. “You’d try to make a joke – it’s what my family did when I was little, and it’s always got us through everything.”