Watch: We visited Staffordshire's TikTok famous Spud Man to see if his baked potatoes live up to the hype

Ben Newman, the man behind the spud, has taken social media by storm with more than two million TikTok followers on his page @spudarmy. Here, he live-streams his day-to-day job as a jacket potato vendor in Tamworth town centre – which he has been doing for 21 years – attracting customers from as far as Malaysia.

With around one million views per video, it was time to see what all the fuss was about.

I made sure to have a sandwich before I went, because a number of Spud Man's videos show queues forming in front of his van as early as 7am, and hundreds of people long. I did not know what terrors awaited me, nor when I would return... but actually I only had to wait for 10 minutes.

Yes, it was a lovely surprise. I was confronted by a queue of only 15 people, and they were all very excited to be there, taking pictures and videos and calling over to the potato maestro himself, who engaged in friendly conversation with each of them.

Opening hours online say the spud van is open until 3.30pm on Tuesdays, so I arrived at 3pm – little did I know they were actually meant to close seven minutes ago (it was 3.07 now) but Ben was determined to tackle the queue.