For The Love of Huns
How a hun appreciation account became a pandemic lifeline
Words by Kemi Alemoru
Searching for even a small crumb of optimism right now is a titanic task. Of course, it has been made harder as we’re all still reeling from a deep dark Christmasless winter, Covid-19’s second tidal wave, the silent battle between new variants pushing us into lockdown #47, being gaslit by an angry and divisive media, increased racial tension, Brexit – need I proceed with my triggering list? Yet Love of Huns, one of the best pages on Instagram, manages to find a way to unite us all behind the one thing Britain excels at: pop culture.
Originally created in 2017, the page was initially a place for the anonymous creator and her friends to “shitpost” vintage clips that made them laugh. Now it boasts over 484,000 followers. Speaking to Riposte over the phone, she says that she and her friends wanted to build a shrine to “iconic moments”. When a generation comes of age and realises that the world is actually incredibly painful, they hark back for a simpler time, meaning we’re pretty much always on a 20-year nostalgia loop. Love of Huns is a portal to your Freudian id.
“What I like about the page is that you can scroll through and it actually takes you back to all these iconic funny moments that people forget,” says the page admin. Those moments might be Beyonce dueting with Alexandra Burke on X-Factor, or ultimate hun icon Nikki Grahame, who will be sorely missed forever asking, “who is she?” while gesticulating wildly in the diary room. While a lot of the content comes from her own scrolling through YouTube and Google, now the wider community forward her moments from their memory banks. “It’s that one clip you’ll always remember in the back of your head from X-Factor 2013 and somewhere that I can upload the weird amount of pictures of Steps, Dani Minogue and Cheryl Cole I have in my photo albums. God knows what the police would think if they found it.”
Before the page, there weren’t that many hotspots to reflect on these snapshots that we just absorbed as if they were normal: Martine McCutcheon (yoghurt legend) beaming on the cover of OK! magazine as a key part of Liza Minelli and David Gest’s wedding in 2002, Graham Norton pouring salad cream on Denise Van Outen’s cleavage in 2000 to advertise the Heinz condiment, a 2013 shot of Lady Gaga clinking red wine glasses with June Brown AKA Dot Cotton on the Graham Norton sofa. And the latter example drives right to the heart of the magic of the page. It stands in such stark contrast to American pop culture and its starlets. Polished, produced, glossy and well funded. British huns are sometimes unpolished around the edges, a unique brand of high-camp, hilarious and slightly unhinged.
What’s become clear about the UK, especially recently, is how its own deeply entrenched view of itself bears no resemblance to reality. We want to project that we are a nation of Shakespeare-appreciative, measured, prim and proper BBC types, but as illustrated through the delightfully low brow archive, we are a far more nuanced nation.
Huns, like the British Populus, are not a monolith. We are all at once Peter Marsh losing it because he didn’t get the kudos he felt he deserved in his episode of Come Dine With Me and Jane awkwardly trying to enjoy her “sad little life”. You’ve got your classy basic huns whose bodies are 60% water and at least 30% prosecco from the humble bottomless brunch. A posh spice type. The raucous hun akin to Alison Hammond, Vanessa Feltz or Gemma Collins. There’s the Mrs Hinch/TOWIE star grey crushed velvet-homed hun. A Samantha Mumba-esque simple sweetheart hun. It’s hard to pinpoint what unites them all but Love of Huns’ creator gives it a go. “The sarcasm, the dryness, the ridiculousness of it all,” she explains while laughing.
Regardless of which hun faction you identify with most there is a collective understanding that the hun and everything associated with her is something to be proud of and protected at all costs. Shaughna Phillips’ “congrats hun” moment with Rishma Dosani on 2020’s Love Island already feels out of step, calling someone a hun is no longer seen as an insult, it’s swung back around to a deep term of endearment.
In a Vice article by Hannah Ewens, she writes that the hun emerged out of the ladette era, where the media splayed images of women falling out of clubs drunk and corrective reality shows like Ladette to Lady popped up to try and lecture a whole generation of women who were, “a blight on society”. The early 00s also ushered in the beginning of reality music shows like Pop Idol and X-Factor, the sacred sites of many original huns, while Supernanny and How Clean is Your House attempted to show exemplary views of British womanhood to bring order back into society. Alas, it turns out Kim Woodburn is a far more dangerous agent of chaos than any club-loving ladette.
While not every hun post harks back to mid 00s binge drinking and moral decay, each post is oddly aspirational. One can only dream of being as fun, carefree and untethered as a Love of Huns hun. Although each post is layered with irony, the true tragedy is that things were definitely better then than they are right now.
In 2020, the page has actually performed a public service. It has always mixed archive content with news and reactions—before lockdown, this could be telling followers to vote in the European elections via an image of the cheeky girls wearing blue dresses adorned with yellow EU stars—however, it has become a humorous space to process our current unrecognisable British reality via memorable snapshots of the past. “It's always fun to relate it to what's currently going on and be reactive. If Boris says the pubs are reopening you might find that one clip of someone walking into the pub in EastEnders, or when the football super league drama was at its height Love of Huns gave us Cheryl Cole (now just Cheryl) and Victoria Beckham at their WAG best. Love of Huns explains. “Someone actually commented ‘I can't believe I'm getting my news from Love of Huns.’ and I’m like, ‘We love to see it!’ It’s informative and entertaining.”
Connecting the past and present is helpful to offset the trauma of a disorienting year. In a BBC Bitesize article, Tim Wildschut, a professor of Social and Personality Psychology at the University of Southampton, noted that “nostalgia increases optimism”. With current circumstances being so unfamiliar leaving people feeling isolated, reminiscing allows us to remember when we were happy and is a model for our post-pandemic behaviour. We are all trapped on this island (minus Dubai-bound Love Island influencers) scrambling to find things we like about being here. Collective nostalgia as observed through Love of Huns’ enthusiastic community is a way to feel connected and to stay entertained.
Our own lives may be drab and relatively free of high octane moments so embracing the camp, the colourful, the garish is a welcomed means of escape. It’s why the latest series of UK Drag Race feels like mental health support with its challenges that interpolate British morning TV, soaps and have cameos from Lorraine Kelly, Natalie Cassidy and Alan Carr. “British pop culture is just so unique and weird for example, the bloody Bing Bang Bong song on Drag Race. Try and explain that to any other country and they're literally like: 'what the fuck?'” points of Love of Huns. It’s purposefully ludicrous, to elevate your mood against all the odds.
Recently we have seen the return of Tracey Beaker, while Alison Hammond got a new job presenting This Morning and Zoom-queen Jackie Weaver is leaning into her authority having cut a dance track. Campy British culture is the only thing keeping us going right now. It’s a reminder that there are silver linings in our grey existence. Huns have united us in this crisis and have encouraged us to live, laugh, love through our collective trauma.
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