Bognor Regis family's social media empire gave grandad a new lease on life after cancer diagnosis
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Mr Mills, also known as Grandad, was diagnosed during lockdown when he was already a regular fixture in TheClient’s Facebook videos. Filmed by and featuring his son Peter, the videos consist of pranks, vlogs and other content which, the Mills family say, is designed to ‘put a smile on people’s faces.’
Attracting millions of views across a range of platforms, and 30,000 followers on Facebook, the videos have gone down a treat with fans all over the world, and it’s that huge sense of community, Rob said, that gave him the strength when he needed it most.
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Hide Ad“Since the start of the lockdowns, I’ve been through prostate cancer, Covid, which hospitalised me, and then a quadruple bypass a month after that,” Rib said. “Peter put something out on the page, and all these thousands of messages came through from people who like our videos. People saying ‘you make my life really fun, thank you for everything you do, get well soon.’ And it was just nice to have that support.”
"It wasn’t even just from TheClient page,” Peter adds. “They went through to his personal messenger and stuff like that.”
Peter, who works as a traffic warden, first started TheClient back in 2019, after briefly appearing in a video posted by another famous social media duo, The Bald Builders and things took off quickly from there.
"The Bald Builders were here doing some work for us. They included me in a few of their videos telling a couple of jokes, and people kept saying I should do my own thing.
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Hide Ad"Grandad started out as the cameraman, which turned out to be an appalling idea, because he’d never look at the camera. He’d always look at you, so when you’d go back over the footage, he was always filming something else!”
No matter what happens, though, they say TheClient is all about having fun and making people happy. “It doesn’t matter if we have 100 followers or one million, we’d still be doing the same content in the same way. If we can put a smile on someone’s face, we’re doing our job.”