The Disturbing Reality Of Competitive Endurance Tickling

New Zealand documentary Tickled started out as a light-hearted look at one of the stranger 'sports' out there — competitive endurance tickling — but ended up uncovering an American-based online tickling empire willing to go to extreme lengths to punish even the smallest slight or scrutiny, a shadowy hornet's nest of intimidation, endemic cyber-bullying and vexatious litigation.

Throughout it seems completely bizarre that a pastime so seemingly innocuous on the surface — albeit with obvious fetish overtones — could mask something so insidious, the filmmakers ultimately embroiled in an intricate web of intrigue as scary as it is surreal.

"There's a percentage of participants from competitive tickling who absolutely became a target of this harassment campaign."

"It started out as another two-minute whacky story for the end of the news, which has kinda been my job for the last decade at least," explains journalist David Farrier. "I stumbled across [competitive endurance tickling] and saw that some New Zealanders had taken part, and Australians. So it felt very local to me, that's why I reached out — 'Oh my god, New Zealanders had taken part in competitive tickling in LA, and they've sent their audition tapes from New Zealand. Can I do a story?'

"Once they replied with such a big 'no' in various ways — whether through their personal emails or when they hired a lawyer in New York and a lawyer in Auckland — I just thought, 'There's got to be more to this story than tickling.'"

The initial emails to the openly gay Farrier from Jane O'Brien Media, the production company behind the tickling events, following his innocent inquiry were incredibly over-the-top and vitriolic.

"Yeah they were [disturbing]," he admits. "It was this weird mixture of them being almost so extreme — they were so homophobic and then they went into almost weirdly racist territory — that I didn't know whether to laugh at them or be offended by them, it was this really weird line because it was so full on."

Yet this pales into insignificance compared to the harassment campaigns unleashed on tickling participants themselves who fell from grace with the shadowy puppet-master.

"Some people go on this tickling competition and they're fine. They go and they take part and they fly home and they don't hear anything of it," Farrier explains. "But there's a percentage of participants from competitive tickling who absolutely became a target of this harassment campaign. There were many reasons why they were targeted, but it's been happening for a long time."

Throughout the filming Farrier and collaborator Dylan Reeve stood firm in the face of pressure only the deepest pockets can apply, before their perseverance unravelled the whole sordid affair.

"There's still lawsuits involved now so I can't speculate on anything in particular," Farrier tells, "but in a wider way I'd say that the film is intentionally a commentary on bullying and what it can do. It's not like people magically turn into bullies, there's usually a reason that they end up this way. Part of the hope is that people will walk out just thinking a little bit about bullying and the fact that it's a big cyclical thing, and just not to start that cycle."