A Newark area man has become a TikTok sensation after reeling in millions of views for his videos, which feature him reviewing tinned fish from all over the world.

Marcus Ansell, who is known to his followers as @TinnedFishReviews, has 615,000 followers on TikTok hooked on his posts, where he opens and taste-tests cans of fish, including trout, salmon, mackerel, and sardines.

Usually wearing a fez and sitting in his home near Newark, Marcus uses his videos to explore the weird and wonderful and everything in between, from tins of sardines from Asda to exotic canned seafood shipped in from Japan.

And in his most popular video — which has so far gained six million views — he is seen tucking into a tin of Surstromming, a lightly-salted fermented Baltic Sea herring that smells so bad he has to open the can while holding it underwater.

Marcus started his videos 18 months ago when his sister sent him four different types of tinned fish for Christmas.

A newcomer to TikTok and keen to see what would happen, he decided to ask his wife, Lucy, to film him opening one of the tins and then giving his verdict.

The video, which featured bay mackerel in olive oil, was a hit, encouraging him to post another video, this time featuring more mackerel, in a hot and spicy sauce.

More reviews and thousands more views followed, with Marcus featuring tins of tuna and sardines from his local supermarket and then deciding to get his dog, an eight-year-old Collie/Great Pyrenees cross called Arthur, in on the act.

Lucy, who is known on-screen as The Cameraman, does all of the filming and editing and, 18 months later, Marcus is a bona-fide ‘tinfluencer’ who is recognised as the world’s leading online reviewer of tinned fish products.

He receives packages containing dozens of tinned products every week and has been courted by a host of tinned fish companies, including the London-based The Tinned Fish Market, which later invited him and Lucy to the capital to try out its latest canned products.

He also took part in a meet and greet — with Marcus reporting that the queue “went out of the shop and around the corner” — and his fame was confirmed when he posted a video reviewing the Tinned Fish Market’s Los Peperetes’ ventresca (tuna belly) with Jersey butter.

Not only did it get thousands of views, it sparked a rush of orders and led to the company’s entire stock of the product selling out.

The story was featured in the Daily Telegraph and The Times newspapers and since then Marcus’ fame has grown even further, with one of his latest reviews, looking at Portuguese octopus in extra virgin olive oil, garlic and salt, getting more than 310,000 views in one day.

He has also been name-checked by comedian Romesh Ranganathan on Harry Hill’s “Are We There Yet?” podcast — he said Marcus was “making fish cool again” — and was given a mention in Waitrose Food magazine.

Marcus said: “It all started for fun and I never expected anything to really happen, but it’s grown so much that I now get thousands of views online, loads of comments, and dozens of tins to review delivered to me every month. I try to eat as many of them as I can.

“It’s amazing and really enjoyable, and being mentioned by Romesh on Harry’s podcast was fantastic. I’m a huge fan of both of them and I was delighted that they talked about me and what I was doing.

“I could never have imagined there was such an appetite for people watching videos of someone else opening a tin of fish and then taste-testing it.

“What’s lovely is when I get a box of products, there is often a note inside it from someone who has seen my video somewhere in another country and liked it so much that they went to the effort of sending me tinned fish to try.

“That really brings it home to me quite how popular the videos are and how people are enjoying what I’m doing.”

Although the range of tinned fish products at our local supermarket might typically be limited to sardines, tuna, and mackerel, the global tinned fish market is vast and worth around one billion dollars.

The world’s biggest tuna exporter is Thailand, with Morocco selling the most sardines by volume and Portugal taking the title as home to artisanal, gourmet sardines.

Marcus said: “We went to Lisbon to visit a famous tinned fish restaurant called Sol e Pesca and we learned just why Portugal produces the best tinned fish in the world.

“They are also very keen on sardine roe, which is really time-consuming to harvest and costs about £50 a tin. I’m very lucky because The Tinned Fish Market sent me tins of that to review and it tastes amazing.

“It’s been very surprising, but probably what’s surprised me most is finding out how many small companies there are selling tinned fish and discovering that there is a huge variety of different products available.”

You can find Marcus on TikTok at @tinnedfishreviews and on Instagram at @tinned_fish_reviews

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