They didn't realise they were being filmed, but 14 million were watching

Ten women with strappy heels and perfect make up head down Deansgate. Like everyone else who follows in this vision of Manchester, they’re dressed for the club. You know, how you attire yourself when you want to lose it to your favourite song without sweating up a storm: little dresses, little tops. One of them holds a phone to her ear to listen to a voice note, another reaches for something in a tiny blue handbag. The camera follows them past Toni & Guy, towards the stretch of nightclubs and expensive bars on Peter Street.

This is Manchester Nightlife, a new trend where TikTok creators share videos of women wandering the streets on a night out in town. If you scroll TikTok, what you’re shown is determined by the algorithm, so your feed will be different to mine — but most of the time, there’s a purpose to the videos you’re shown (a joke, a new fashion trend, a hot take). What seems striking about these videos — at least in contrast to TikTok’s mainstream content — is that they feel purely voyeuristic. 

Scroll the trend, and you’ll be gawking at women on nights out with their friends, with no takeaway or larger framework to the videos. This might not sound like a terribly compelling offer, but some content creators are getting an outsized response to videos like this. @Dinamimi59, with 398,000 TikTok followers and who also goes by the name Walking in China, has become a well-known name in local women’s groups in recent months as his videos of drunken women in Manchester have hit millions of views.

In the Reddit thread I started on the topic, the consensus is that this isn’t exactly unprecedented, with those posting reminiscing about when Daily Mail photographers would head to Sunderland and Liverpool to capture wild Freshers’ Week parties (plus, for that matter, who can forget that viral renaissance-style photo of New Year’s in Manchester a few years back?). But watch enough of these videos and you’ll start to see an extremely skewed version of the city, where beautiful, drunk women are on every street and there’s a nightclub on every corner. You’ll also notice something else: these women aren’t looking directly at the camera, and don’t appear to be aware that they’re being filmed. 

Chelle, who works as a personal assistant, says she’s appeared in these kinds of videos twice now, but didn’t realise she was being filmed on either occasion. She sends me the first video — it was her 25th birthday and she was going to the nightclub Impossible in the Great Northern with her friends. She’s wearing a green dress and white high heels, her hair loose. Since it was posted in November, it has amassed over 14 million views and 11,000 comments.

The videos are shot in extreme close ups, so it’s possible that whoever was behind the footage of Chelle was wearing a discreet body camera or has edited the footage to make it look like they’re a lot closer to the women. Would she have consented to being filmed, if someone had asked? “No,” she says. She adds that her friend, a Sikh man who usually doesn’t drink for religious reasons, panicked when he realised that his family might be able to see footage of him going out clubbing.