THERE is something about "real-life calamity" for Serena Terry, the new Derry TikTok star, that is inexplicably funny.
Whether it is the high stress of a hot beach day with young children or wriggling a not-so-hot "summer body" into a too-tight swimsuit, the imperfections of life as we know it are captured in glorious absurdity in her hit Mammy Banter videos.
"Family life is made up of little calamities and it is that old thing – if you didn't laugh, you'd cry," says the mum-of-two who, thanks to validation from half-a-million followers on the online video sharing site, is now fleshing out her Mammy Banter character in a new book.
She has just signed a book deal with HarperCollins and is already "three chapters in", revelling in the chance to give her beleaguered 'Mammy' some background and context for old and new fans.
"There is loads of new material," she enthuses.
"The book is really taking Mammy Banter out and giving her a full character – giving her a bit of background. In the videos, you don't really know who she is or why she is the way she is, so the book fills in all those missing details.
"It is going to be the secret life of a mum in her mid-30s, going back to when she was teenager and touching on marriage issues, career, professional life. I have taken some inspiration from my own background growing up, but like any book, imagination is a big part of it.
"I am really, really excited about the potential – it is turning into a mum-type Bridget Jones with lots of hilarity and calamity."
But behind the skits lies a serious side to Serena Terry, who has drawn upon expert skills in digital marketing to start up her own digital marketing consultancy – using Mammy Banter videos as a case study to attract new clients.
She "took the leap" and left the software company where she had worked to set up Catchy Co in June and is now helping other people capitalise on the power of social media with catchy TikTok videos of their own.
"Basically, the growth of Mammy Banter has allowed me to that," she says.
"I put up one video on my Mammy Banter account to say I'd done it – I'd taken the leap – and then I had 7,000 followers on my business account on Instagram within a couple of hours.
"I've got customers in America and Australia now, as well as local customers, so it was good to show the proof is in the pudding; to say, 'This is my case study – this is how I grow Mammy Banter'.
"Everyone thinks you just come on and hit it at the right time with comedic content, but that's not the full story. I am a social media marketing expert and have been for 15 years. I studied marketing at Ulster University and I lectured part-time there and also lectured for the North West School of Marketing [in Derry], so there is a professional side to all of this."
There is also a serious aspect, in terms of her mental health, as behind the 'Banter', Terry was struggling to cope at the beginning of lockdown.
"I was on edge; my mental health was really, really bad," she reveals.
"The home-schooling in particular, I found tough. I felt like the worst mummy ever because the wee one [Alfie, aged five] wasn't taking me on in any of the teaching. Then, when I made the home-schooling series of videos for Mammy Banter, I realised a lot of people out there were feeling exactly the same way.
"People responded by saying, 'Oh, you have made me feel so much better – this is my life too at the moment and you have helped me feel that I am not alone'. When I received that sort of feedback, it was a wee bit of therapy for me as well – it was a situation where I seemed to be helping people by making them laugh and they were helping me in return.
"Home-schooling was just awful, really terrible. You're trying to work full-time and also be a teacher to your kids. It was time to take a step back and laugh or I really would have cried."
Among the hundreds of videos – described as a sort of "warts and all" antidote to the air-brushed, artificial perfection of Instagram – there are body positivity messages and a trashing of the pressure to have a "summer body" ready to pick up and put on for a day at the beach.
"Some of the videos were really trying to step away from this idea that everybody is perfect by saying, 'Come on! How do you have a 'summer' body?' It is really poking fun at all that," she says in the soft Derry accent that seems to lend itself instinctively to comedy.
"The main message is, 'We're not perfect women and we're not perfect mothers; we're all just basically hanging on by a thread here; my child is as crazy as yours; everyone is struggling and we're all going through this s*** together."
After discovering the video sharing site TikTok during the first lockdown in 2020 thanks to her 12 year-old daughter, Ava, Serena and husband, Mark (who has his own online drama going on with Daddy Banter) sat on the sofa one evening and laughed the night away at all the funny videos.
"We genuinely didn't speak to each other, we were just laughing the whole night," she recalls.
"It became apparent straight away that this was a social media app that was far removed from the likes of Facebook and Instagram in terms of it being 'real life' – it was for adults too, it was comical and I loved it.
"I was completely turned off at that stage by the whole 'perfect me' thing with Instagram. I could not go on at look at somebody's perfect house and their perfect family and all their perfect white furniture – I was thinking, 'This is not f***ing real life; we're in the middle of a pandemic, we're home-schooling and we're putting on weight!"
She decided to 'have a go' herself and, after early efforts using voice-overs, it dawned that she could get her comedy across better using her own voice and doing her own skits.
"I've always been a bit of comedian, I suppose – my dream is to write comedy for TV – so I enjoyed having a bit of creativity at a time when we were all wondering what we were going to do," she explains.
"I experimented and found that bringing real-life calamity to a video, piecing it together and then putting on a funny voice seemed to resonate with people. It was instantly relatable, so I kept on doing them."
Attaining TikTok 'verification' status last month, Terry is still turning out one Mammy Banter video a day and never worries about running out of ideas:
"I think, as a woman, there is always a calamity around the next corner; there is always something that people can relate to. It's brilliant, because when you're not perfect, you've got so much material to work with. How boring would it be, if life was always perfect?"
