‘We became weirdly obsessed’: how a ‘poodunnit’ podcast about a wedding’s dirty secret went viral

“If someone asked me about my wedding, the first thing that would come to my mind would be the bathroom,” says Karen Whitehouse. It is not the answer most people would give, but most people haven’t had the misfortune to find poop on the floor of the women’s loo at their wedding reception. And, from the small number who have, even fewer have made a hit podcast about it.

Who Shat on the Floor at My Wedding? is a 13-part “poodunnit” from Whitehouse, her wife, Helen McLaughlin, and their friend Lauren Kilby, in which they grill friends and family in an attempt to find out who was responsible. First released in 2020, it has recently raced to the top of the Apple podcast charts in the UK – thanks to the website still known as Twitter at the time of writing. The social media network’s users boosted listeners from the hundreds of thousands to the millions.

My first question for the Who Shat? crew, as we speak via video call, is: Why? Why choose to share this stomach-churning incident with the world? And why make a “true crime” show about it?

“We became weirdly obsessed with trying to crack the case ourselves,” says Whitehouse, whose 2018 wedding to McLaughlin took place on a boat in Amsterdam, where the couple live. “Just personally, you want to know who would do such a thing on such a special day.” McLaughlin nods. “Whenever we got together with a group of people, everyone would want to talk about it,” she says. “There was one party where we must have spoken about it for four hours. We were like, what’s going on, why are we talking about poo? But it just captured people’s imaginations – we thought, there’s something here …”

Kilby, who is originally from New Zealand (Whitehouse and McLaughlin are from the UK), is the show’s “detective”, assisted by a legitimate online private investigator course. Like Whitehouse and McLaughin, she had heard her fair share of theories about the day from wannabe sleuths. “People would say: ‘I thought that person was a bit drunk, or how about the pregnant lady …?’” No one, not even Karen’s mother, was safe from suspicion.

Despite being a show about possibly the grossest thing you could imagine someone doing in public, there is definitely a joy and a sense of unbridled silliness to Who Shat? It’s not unlike the vibe that has made shows such as My Dad Wrote a Porno so successful. Coupled with a central mystery, beloved of the podcast world from crime shows to more sideways cultural series such as Whatever Happened to Pizza at McDonald’s? or Decoder Ring, it manages to feel at once high stakes and totally ludicrous. Friends are rigged up to a “police edition” lie detector almost certainly intended as a stocking filler; one line of inquiry leads Kilby and Whitehouse to a zoo.

It is also a true word-of-mouth hit; although Whitehouse and Kilby knew how to craft a slickly produced series from their day jobs in advertising – and the show garnered nods from the British Podcast Awards and the Webbys on its initial release – unlike much of the big-money podcast industry in 2023, this was a show made entirely under their own steam. That also makes for a slightly unorthodox approach to proceedings that you are unlikely to hear on true crime podcast Serial. Kilby initially asks for guests’ underwear, only for no one to provide it. While she planned to purloin them from a few suspects, she says, still very much in character: “It’s hard to know what [people’s] special wedding underwear is. And by that point the wedding was two years ago. By then, I’m probably not going to find anything incriminating in their underwear. And if I did, it would probably be unrelated …”

Surprisingly, they managed to enlist some experts along the way, among them Mike Berry, a clinical forensic psychologist, who provides the incredible insight that a “a very loose faeces [suggests] someone might have been anxious … if it’s a very hard faeces then it’s an indication of somebody who’s angry and bitter about what they’re doing.” Whitehouse says: “I got an email from him this morning. He said he’s in awe of our success. He also said that his career is really over now, but he doesn’t regret getting involved.” Kilby adds: “The one thing that keeps me up at night was that we didn’t get a police sketch artist to draw the poo from the perspective of the different witness statements, because they were quite conflicting.”

Much of the show revolves around a few recurring characters, including the couple’s friend Henk, who raises suspicions when it transpires that he spent most of the evening in the women’s toilets, even eating in there. (“He went down there immediately after Karen and Helen said ‘I do’, and he was there for the rest of the evening,” Kilby says). As well as reports of strange behaviour, a number of left-field theories are also explored. Could a wild animal have snuck on to the boat? Could it have been a revenge attack? And was a submarine spotted in the vicinity? The group even turn to a psychic to point them in the right direction. (“She was the real deal,” says McLaughlin. “She even channelled messages from my dead mother to Karen.”)

Although the podcast world has been in ruder health, with cuts at the likes of Spotify and the pandemic-era boom seemingly levelling off, shows such as Who Shat? prove there is still room for funny, sideways ideas to rise above the surfeit. TV rights have long been acquired and, after the success of season one, Kilby, McLaughlin and Whitehouse are gearing up for a second – not about the poo, but on another unsolved case. “Anything the police would laugh at,” says Whitehouse. “That’s our area.” They have bought a “military edition” lie detector (essentially the same model as their police one, but in camo) and what Whitehouse describes as “proper undercover equipment” for their next case. They have even found another psychic, this time one who helped to solve a murder in the US. “The crime isn’t related to bodily fluid, which will disappoint a lot of people,” says Kilby. “But we’re upgrading to something more sinister, and classier.” Luckily, though, the central turd of season one hasn’t totally ruined their memories of their special day. “Apart from the poop,” says Whitehouse, “it was wonderful.”

Who Shat on the Floor at My Wedding? is available on all podcast platforms now

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