Make Me A Offer: meet the TikTok veterans

Teresa and Michael Barnett have lived in the same home for 44 of their 60 years of marriage. They have raised nine children here. Made thousands of meals here and put on even more washes. They have bickered here and made up only to begin bickering again. And they have seen at least one of their children return to live here, their youngest, a twin named James, who for the past couple of years has very precisely documented the eccentricity of his parents’ everyday lives. Their singular devotion to puddings; their full-strength infatuation with Diana, Princess of Wales; their odd round-about conversations.

The Barnett family has, in the process of his filming under the moniker Make Me A Offer, become internet-famous, amassing tens of millions of views and more than 600,000 followers across TikTok and Instagram, for their own version of the sweary chaos of pleasant suburban life. And I love it.

Imagine my thrill, then, when a few weeks ago I found the couple sitting at their festively dressed dining table, having their picture taken for this magazine. Teresa is 79. She was wearing a turtleneck under a red apron emblazoned, delightfully, with what fans consider to be her catchphrase: “The proof of the pudding is in the eating.” Michael, who is 83, was sitting low in a chair next to his wife, in a fetching tie, shirt and braces, his trousers pulled nipplewards. “The only thing I’m wearing that’s mine is my underpants!” he told me, matter of factly.

Everyone in the room – the photographer and the stylists, Michael and Teresa, James and his husband, Justin, who is a quiet presence in James’s videos – was in a jolly mood, all of us in our socks, surrounded by red and gold foil decorations, as though we were having our very own Christmas gathering. When I noticed a commemorative biscuit tin made for Charles and Diana’s 1981 engagement – a motif from the videos, such is the couple’s fandom – I inhaled sharply. James pointed out the brooch Teresa is wearing, which also featured Charles and Diana. “Poor Diana,” says Teresa. “It was dreadful wasn’t it. But Charles is quite happy now with his new wife.”

It is an odd thing, visiting a home made familiar by social media, not unlike the feeling you might get stepping on to the set of a soap opera. I know these people and yet I don’t. They are familiar to me but also complete strangers. At one point during the shoot, Teresa eased a Chanel jacket from her shoulders, described it as “very nice” and then added, quite seriously, “but where would I wear it? Not at the supermarket…” The comment felt so specific to the Teresa I know from James’s videos, a statement so singular to the character I had assumed had been in some way constructed, that I felt an uncanny moment of surreality, as though I were watching one of the couple’s videos in real time, or the inverse, real life through my phone.

I asked them all how they were finding their newfound fame. “They get asked for selfies every time they go to Waitrose,” James said. “The first time,” Teresa said, “we were walking across the car park and a woman with her two children asked if we were the ones from TikTik, or whatever it’s called. I didn’t know what they were on about!”

Before becoming famous on “TikTik”, Teresa and Michael lived an entire life. They were born in the same hospital, four years apart, and as teenagers lived 200 yards from each other. Michael’s family kept chickens; Teresa’s mother was one of the villagers who bought their eggs. Sometimes they travelled on the same school bus, although they didn’t get to know each other properly until they both joined the church choir. “We got half a crown for funerals,” Michael told me. “And only sixpence for everything else!” They had a small wedding when Teresa was 19, spent a night on the Isle of Wight as a honeymoon, and began the business of creating a huge family: nine children, the twins “a surprise at the end”, Teresa told me, carefully. Michael worked, becoming the company director of his father’s abrasives business, a school governor and, after he retired, a clerk for various governing bodies. Teresa stayed at home, keeping two washing machines running constantly, serving the kids meals in staggered sittings, stretching the leftovers from a Sunday roast to Monday, sometimes Tuesday. They got around in a VW van that had been converted into a 10-seat minibus. “And we had a big dog,” Michael said. “I got up at six, peeled potatoes for 11 people, made bottles of milk for the twins, fed and walked the dog, then went to work.”

How did you cope? I asked.

“Rigid timetables,” Michael said.

“You just did it,” said Teresa.

At intervals during our conversation, Teresa got up and left the living room in which we were sitting to check on the fashion team packing up clothes in the hallway. Do they need help? Do they want beans on toast? Have they got a coat? Michael held court in the meantime, recounting his father’s time living in a shed in Saskatchewan, Canada, and the council houses he lived in as a child – “bloody hard times” – though he too left the room at one point, returning with a tiny armature shaft he hoped would illustrate his answer to a question I had asked about his career. “This is the smallest one we ever produced on the factory floor,” he told me, not without pride, as I peered at the motor component in his palm. James, who calls his parents by their first names, did his best to usher Teresa back to the sofa and to keep his dad on topic.

“Michael, we will need to bring this back to the point of the interview,” he said.

“Oh, be quiet,” Michael said. “I’m trying to give her some background!”

When he was growing up, James considered Teresa and Michael to be old-fashioned, lacking awareness of pop culture, less cool than his friends’ younger parents. “But I knew they were funny,” he told me, “because whenever anyone visited they were enthralled by both of them.”

While studying performance design at Central Saint Martins in 2007, he enlisted Teresa and Michael as subjects in a documentary he was making for a film module, for which he received positive reaction from his peers and which inspired him to build what James describes as “an archive of totally inconsequential material”: Michael’s obsessive cleaning, hatred of pot-holes, his blunt honesty; Teresa’s unorthodox sandwich-making skills, her suspicion of electricity, her love-hate relationship with birds.

Alongside his own full-time job in the creative industry (he has edited Doctor Who trailers for BBC Studios, but preferred not to say exactly what he does now, referring to his work as “comms”), James compiled their idiosyncrasies into short and long-form films, showing them at screenings and submitting them to festivals. He had resisted social media, fearing a compromise in artistic merit, but in 2023 he posted one on TikTok and very quickly it garnered 1m views. When he did it again, the same thing happened. “I knew then there was an audience for this,” he told me. “We had to strike while the iron was hot.”

At a 2024 event curated by the creative platform It’s Nice That, James spoke about the family’s success, describing his parents as “anti-influencers” – an antidote to the insincerity and the “fake reality” of their polished, modern-day, much younger counterparts. “They’re the last generation who are truly authentic and indifferent in front of the camera,” he said. For the brands clambering to work with them, James told me, this has become the couple’s USP. “When we make bangers and mash for Waitrose, it’s a scenario of complete chaos, because that is genuinely how they cook,” he said. “I’m trying to capture what I’ve known since I was a child and turn it into something tangible.” PRs have been known to ask for Michael’s swearing to be kept in the edit; one was thrilled when James confessed the product they were advertising was dropped and broken on camera. “They understood it was funny, that they wouldn’t get another influencer making a video like it.” The comedy is elevated by James’s production: the droll voiceover to introduce each film; the block text overlay of key phrases; knowing exactly the right moment to cut to the next frame. “I’m completely attuned to Teresa and Michael’s intonation,” he told me. “I know what rhythmic beat is needed.” Having this level of creative control is unusual and liberating, and is at least one of the reasons why they recently turned down an offer to appear on a major television show. “I’ve worked with brands in my career, but I’ve never once been the king of my own country,” James said.

The result is lightning in a bottle: their first ad for the National Trust, which features inclement weather and, at one point, Michael telling his son to “fuck off”, has been seen 13.4m times. “It doesn’t all have to be overbearing positivity,” James said. “Sometimes the weather is crap and you have to swear, or joke to ground things back into normality.”

The couple’s most watched “organic” video (an ad-free post) celebrates 10 years of same-sex marriage becoming legal across the UK, via the medium of James’s wedding to Justin. We see Teresa and Michael struggle with the vocabulary around their being “two husbands” and a non-binary guest; Teresa pondering whether or not her dress is on the right way round and giggling as her makeup is applied; both smiling proudly as they throw confetti over the happy couple. A sweet final shot shows them making room for a framed photo of the wedding on a sideboard already packed with family pictures. James attributes the video’s success – four million people have watched it to date – to his parents’ “unspoken allyship”.

In the living room, Michael agreed, then with matched enthusiasm described the Wetherspoons pub opposite the wedding venue (“quite nice”), visiting a market close to their hotel (“very nice”) and the wedding reception, hosted by a drag queen dressed as a bride. “There was a great big knob hanging from the ceiling,” he said. “You’ve never seen anything like it!” To James, this kind of reaction is typical. “When I came out to them,” he told me, “they just wanted to talk about their new cheese grater. It was just like, ‘Who cares’? I think it’s about not being too deep.”

It is clear from the videos, and from the time I spent at their home, that the relationship between James, Teresa and Michael is a typically familial one: wry but warm, built on gentle ribbing, mild exasperation, outbursts of cackling laughter. Still, it would be remiss not to acknowledge that this elderly couple, who hitherto lived in an entirely analogue world, have been thrust into the digital arena without, perhaps, fully understanding its implication. In one video, James announces to his parents that they’ve reached 200,000 followers on TikTok. “I didn’t know there were that many people living round here,” Teresa responds. There is a suggestion that she is naive to the fact of being watched by strangers all over the world. Although, judging by the chuckle that followed, she seemed to be in on the joke, and continues to be unbothered.

Parents who put their kids through this kind of social-media journey may be seen as exploitative, but James told me he has always been conscious to maintain his parent’s privacy and to never take things further than what is healthy. “It was nerve-wracking to see numbers like that,” he told me, of some of his early viewing figures. “So I make sure there’s nothing identifiable, or incriminating, in the content.” Similarly, brand collaborations are chosen based either on whether they can be filmed at home, or offer a nice day out.

At the house, Michael was eager to tell me about them. “Teresa and I have been to places we would never have bothered to go before,” he said, recounting a partnership with a train company that involved an all-expenses trip to Edinburgh. “We were treated like royalty, you know. I had a deep-fried Mars Bar!” How was it? I asked. “Unusual,” he replied.

Since James started posting, the couple have received almost universally positive messages from all over the world. Most have been thank-yous directed at Michael and Teresa: for making people laugh; for providing reminders of viewers’ own family members living and lost; for solace, even, during a fan’s recovery from drug and alcohol addiction. At a recent birthday party the couple were besieged by people wanting their picture. James and Justin were recognised three times at a techno festival in Berlin. A recurring event, James told me, is grown adults asking half-jokingly if Teresa and Michael will adopt them. “No room at the inn!” Teresa will exclaim, in mild shock.

Their relationship to fame and the internet remains apathetic at best. Teresa has a mobile phone but, she told me, is “too busy” to use it. Michael enjoys WhatsApp and video calls to speak to relatives, but is resolute when it comes to social media: “I’m not a TikTok or Instagram person,” he said. In 2026, James plans to wind down his parents’ content. “Teresa and Michael will remain as satellite characters,” he said, “but I don’t want them, or the audience, to get bored. We’re in the privileged position of having 600,000 followers, and need to future-proof the next stage.”

As well as introducing new family members, such as his twin sister Miriam, there will be a natural shift in the narrative when he and Justin move house. He hopes their existing viewers will follow “two young gay men who have absolutely no idea about DIY trying to fix it up”. For Teresa and Michael, it’s business as usual: enjoying their 25 grandchildren and one great-grandchild; bickering over the crossword; eating trifle. Do they have a message for their fans?

“Thank you for watching and we’re very proud of James,” Teresa said. Michael agreed. “We are grateful and humbled. But, at the end of the day, we’re just ordinary blummin’ people. Nothing special at all.”

Fashion editor Helen Seamons; hair and makeup by Alexis Day using Mz Skin and Nourrir; fashion assistant Sam Deaman

Main image: Michael wears Archie knit, £525, by SS Daley; stripe shirt, £49.95, and tie, £34.95, both by Moss; Kensington check trousers, £169, by Barbour; and leather slippers, £50, by Clarks. Teresa wears checked jacket, SS Daley; trim-detail shirt, £95, Me+Em; slim-leg trousers, £225, The Fold London; and her own slippers. Naughty and Nice mugs, £12, John Lewis