David Farrier Uncovers Surprise Turns in Tickled

Squarely of the “truth is stranger than fiction” category, New Zealand journalist David Farrier’s debut documentary Tickled has touches about it of thriller, mystery, and true-crime genres – even, at times, horror, the Guardian’s Elle Hunt reports.

Yet, Hunt says, the most straightforward, persuasive description persists: it is a documentary about competitive tickling.

“In a perfect world, I kind of don’t want people to know anything about it,” Farrier says by phone from Auckland.

“Thinking it’s going to be a light documentary about competitive tickling – that’s the best possible way to go into the film.”

Easygoing, affable and normal – the straight man to the world’s apparently infinite reserves of weirdness – Farrier has characterised himself in the past as a “quirky-story-light-fluff-journo”.

Outside of New Zealand, he’s become known as “New Zealand’s Louis Theroux”. There is even a physical resemblance, as described by one journalist as “nerdy-looking”.

The journalism, Hunt writes, is excellent – helped along, as most journalism is, by a few strokes of luck – and the story of Tickled is exclaim-aloud, hand-on-mouth remarkable.

As the Guardian’s Nigel Smith wrote of its premiere at Sundance, “the revelations … are too juicy to spoil – the pleasure in watching this documentary is derived from its countless twists”. And no one was more surprised by what he found than Farrier.

Original article by Elle Hunt, The Guardian, August 18, 2016.

Photo by A Ticklish Tale Limited.