‘I adore your head’: how flattery made Troy Hawke a social media star

Imagine visiting your local supermarket. Let’s say you’re in search of bin liners or a tin of something-or-other. That’s when you see him, the suave man in the iridescent silk smoking jacket standing at the entrance to the store, hands clasped behind his back. As you get closer you notice his pencil-thin moustache, his cravat and the kind of two-tone leather shoes favoured by Hollywood stars in the 1930s. Why, you ask yourself, is Clark Gable loitering outside Coles?

At this point the rakish figure catches your eye and offers a devastating smile. “I adore your head,” he says in a posh English drawl. “Love it. It should be carved in marble.”

Meet Troy Hawke, a man who describes himself with little fear of contradiction as Britain’s “leading exponent of non-consensual customer service”. In videos posted on TikTok and Instagram, the sole member of an organisation he calls The Greeters Guild can be seen offering well-turned compliments to complete strangers at the entrance of stores and food outlets. “Captain two bags,” he purrs as a man carrying groceries in each hand passes him on the street. “Perfect weight distribution. You’re just gliding along.”

Hawke is the alter ego of Milo McCabe, a 48-year-old English comedian. He’s been developing the character for more than a decade and insists the dapper chap’s appearance and cheerful demeanour are the result of his upbringing. The way McCabe tells it, Hawke was homeschooled by his well-bred mother and didn’t step outside the family home until he was in his mid-30s. As a result, he’s at odds with his times; a deeply retro fellow who seeks a connection with strangers through compliments.

I met McCabe at a hotel bar in Edinburgh. He’d just performed the biggest gig of his career, a sold-out show in front of several thousand people at the city’s Playhouse. His latest show, which he is bringing to Australia in February, blends stand-up with a greatest hits selection of Hawke’s social media stunts projected on a giant screen.

Hawke is flamboyant – “camp-adjacent” is McCabe’s description – an intoxicating blend of David Niven’s studied charm and Basil Fawlty’s clenched-teeth hysteria. He has the enthusiasm of a labrador puppy and an interesting “superpower”, the ability to convert anyone’s name into a Scrabble score in the blink of an eye. For example, “Alex, you’re an 11. I’ll be honest, the ‘x’ is doing an awful lot of heavy lifting.”

The new show explains the origins of The Greeters Guild. Hawke tells his audience he was recruited as its first and only member by Jan Molby, a (real) Danish footballer who made his name as a midfielder at Liverpool FC in the ’80s. Molby first became aware of The Greeters Guild when Hawke’s catchphrase “What would Jan Molby do?” began trending online. The comedian and the footballer finally met in March 2023 when a mural of Molby and his catchphrase was unveiled near Anfield Stadium in Liverpool.

Today, the off-duty comedian sports a black hoodie, shorts and a pair of sneakers. He’s 190cm tall and keeps in shape with regular visits to a boxing gym. There’s no trace of grey in his thick black hair. I take a leaf out of Hawke’s book and offer him a compliment.

“Oh thanks man,” he says, rolling his eyes with discomfort. “I put it down to high levels of vanity. And the fact that for the past 20 years I haven’t had to have an adult job.”

He pauses, then says: “I give compliments, but I’m British, so I can’t take a compliment.”

He’s vaping, and looks alarmed when I suggest I’ll mention it in this article. Perhaps it’s a vice he conceals from his daughters, Anais, 10, and Ava, eight; his wife, Lesley, is a writer and former BBC radio presenter. The family live in leafy Surrey and he takes them on tour whenever possible.

Stripped of Hawke’s peacock clobber and moustache, McCabe mostly goes unnoticed. Even in Edinburgh, where the Festival Fringe is in full swing, he passes through the crowded streets without interruption. “I love anonymity,” he says in a generic London accent (he grew up in Kingston upon Thames) that is anything but posh. “If I was easily recognised I think I’d be perpetually anxious. It’s nice to have that barrier, to be able to turn it on and off.”

That invisibility may not last, of course. Troy Hawke is hot … and not just in Edinburgh. More than 1.1 million followers devour the videos McCabe posts online and his live shows (including in Australia) are selling out.

Success has not come easily. For the longest time, it seemed it might never come at all. McCabe was 27 when he performed his first stand-up gig and early characters like Nobbo Johnson, an Aussie Rules player turned art critic, displayed little of Hawke’s magnetic charm.

Did he ever consider throwing in the towel? “Well, there were bucketloads of existential dread,” he says. “I remember Googling one of my classmates [from university] and found out he was the No. 4 proctologist in the world. I thought, ‘great, I’m drawing a f---ing moustache on my face with an eyeliner pencil’.”

I’ve always heavily masked my entire life in every situation. That’s why characters like Troy are such a good fit for me.

Milo McCabe

The idea of Troy greeting strangers evolved from a video he made in 2014. Posing as a staff member at a branch of British hardware store Wilko, he got his cousin to film him covertly in the hope he’d be escorted off the premises. Instead, he spent several hours tidying shelves and offering advice to customers. Finally, a manager spotted the imposter and asked him to leave.

Realising the footage of him greeting customers at Wilko’s front entrance was some of his best material, McCabe had an idea. What if he dressed as Troy Hawke and welcomed customers to other stores? He started with a department store in the town of Macclesfield and followed up with a DIY store in Sheffield, overcoming a “full-on panic attack” in the hours before the stunt. “My heart was in my mouth. I was so anxious. I’d never had that feeling before or since.”

His reward was clicks - lots of them. His social media following rocketed each time he pulled on the smoking jacket and stood next to a set of automatic doors. Nowadays, his popularity and online heft means he’s sought by big brands (Lego and Cartier, for example) who get him to greet people on their dime.

It would be easy to say comedy is in his blood. His father, Mike McCabe, is an Irish stand-up who won the British talent show New Faces and appeared on TV in the days when comedians smoked and told jokes about their mother-in-law. In his mid-teens Milo began accompanying Mike to gigs at working men’s clubs and holiday camps. He’d sell tapes of his dad’s routines and soak up the atmosphere: a heady cocktail of booze, smoke and bad language.

The first comedian he ever saw was David Baddiel at The Bearcat Comedy Club in Twickenham. “He came on stage and someone heckled him,” recalls McCabe. “He said ‘f--- it, I don’t need to be here’ and stormed off stage. I was 14 at the time and my mind was blown. It was the confidence, the bravado.”

I ask him if his father – Mike is 77 and still performing – feels any jealousy as a result of his son’s success? “No. Not at all,” he says quickly. “He was very, very dubious when I started, but all he gives me now is love, support and pride.”

McCabe studied psychology at the University of Liverpool, where he acquired a passion for all things Scouse. After that, he enrolled in a four-year masters degree in a form of psychoanalytic theory called Transactional Analysis. He quit after his second year, unable to refuse the siren’s call of stand-up and the offer of playing drums in a band fronted by Tim Booth from the British indie titans James.

As a member of Tim Booth and the Individuals, McCabe spent eight months performing songs from the singer’s solo album at gigs including Glastonbury, T in the Park and V Festival. He rubbed shoulders with the likes of Amy Winehouse, The Killers and Stereophonics and “satisfied all of my drummer fantasies”.

There was, however, a downside to the rock ‘n’ roll lifestyle. “My brain atrophied, because we had a tour manager and all my responsibilities, all my decision-making, were taken away,” he says. “We went to Greece, where James are huge, and it took me two weeks to turn into a dickhead. We were at a party and I started dancing on a table. The tour manager said ‘you’re being a c---’. And I was! It was so quick. I wondered what I’d be like after six months.”

His career as a psychotherapist also ended prematurely, but the impact of his studies and the therapy he underwent as part of them is still apparent. His conversation is peppered with the language and tenets of psychotherapy and he clearly views his psyche as a work in progress. He’s an odd mixture of introvert and extrovert, a man who exudes confidence one minute (“I realised my inner critic was software I could delete from my system”) and self-doubt (“maybe at a certain point I’ll evolve to the point that I don’t need the validation of audiences to feel alright about myself”) the next.

He frequently talks about “masking”, a term psychotherapists use to describe the way some people consciously or unconsciously hide parts of themselves to fit in. “I’ve always heavily masked my entire life in every situation,” he says at one point. “That’s why characters like Troy are such a good fit for me. They’re a mask.”

He also reveals he was diagnosed with Level 1 autism last year. Also known as “high-functioning” autism, the condition causes some people to struggle with social interactions and communication. “It [the diagnosis] contextualised quite a few things,” he says with a shrug. “If they’d said ‘you’re neurotypical’, I’d have said, ’Oh, I’m just a bellend then.”

Not surprisingly, the rollercoaster life of a stand-up comedian has taken its toll. In the early days, when he was still performing as Milo McCabe or a character called Philberto, a Portuguese reality TV show winner who wanted to make it on the UK comedy circuit, he was left bruised and bloodied by a bad gig.

“If I ‘died’ it would ruin my whole weekend,” he recalls. “The self-loathing was incredible. I got booed off stage at The Comedy Store in London and I was about to take a taxi home when I thought ‘No, you don’t deserve a cab after that’. I made myself take a three-hour ride on a night bus so I could sit there and hate myself for longer.”

It was the good gigs that kept him going. “The buzz was incredible. Over the years I’ve honed my craft and found every conceivable means I can use to make sure the outcome is positive. I’m constantly thinking about tweaks, improvements and how to make things better.”

Nowadays, he’s reaping the rewards of all that hard work. Does he think he’ll ever part ways with his most successful character? “I don’t know,” he says. “I really don’t. At the moment I’m just digging what’s going on.”

“Well done! In the moment and loving it,” as Troy Hawke might say.

Troy Hawke performs at Melbourne’s Comedy Theatre, Feb 6-7, Sydney’s Enmore Theatre, Feb 8; and Brisbane Powerhouse, Feb 11-12; livenation.com.au