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Map Men
Geography edutainment miniseries From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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Map Men is a British edutainment mini-series[2][3] which is created, written, and presented by Jay Foreman and Mark Cooper-Jones.[2][3][4] A mix of comedy and geography,[4] its videos regularly attract 1 to 5 million views on YouTube.[1][2][3]
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The series is created, written, and presented by Jay Foreman and Mark Cooper-Jones.[2][3][4] Mark Cooper-Jones is a former geography teacher,[3][4] and the pair met at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, where both were performing in 2009 or 2010.[4][5] The series started in 2016,[4] and has aired for four complete series, with a fifth one currently airing. The episodes are a mix of comedy and geography,[4] with each episode answering a short geographical question, often involving maps.[4] The style has been compared to Horrible Histories[2][3] and the pair cite their inspiration as Monty Python.[4] The videos feature deadpan, split-second visual gags, and comic sketches.[3][6]
The pair have claimed the show's success to be due to the growing redundancy of maps as an everyday item, leaving them to be "geeky".[4] They also cite the mix of comedy and geography as the unique element behind the series, leading to its success compared to other more education-based alternatives.[6] In 2021, the series was nominated under the "learning and education" category for the 11th Streamy Awards, losing to Veritasium.[7] In 2024, an edited version of the video about why some British place-names are hard to pronounce won 'Video of the Year' in the inaugural UK and Ireland TikTok Awards.[8] In October 2025, the duo released the book This Way Up: When Maps Go Wrong (And Why It Matters) (ISBN 978-0-3697-7503-0).
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- Includes the sponsored episode "Map Men vs. Geoguessr", as well as two sponsored shorts about the Ordnance Survey, all of which were released between series 4 and 5 and were produced outside of the standard episode production cycle.
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