He gave them some booze clues.
An intoxicated passenger saved the day on a delayed train by hilariously challenging “gloomy” passengers to help him solve a crossword puzzle.
A TikTok clip of the locomotive morale booster amassed over 3.7 million views before being taken down.
“It really lightened the mood,” videographer Damion Francis, 39, told Kennedy News of the unorthodox time-killing technique.
He and a few friends had reportedly been traveling to Bath from London after partying with friends when the transit system became stalled by a series of deluges.
“The group of us four guys just went out to London. We’d been out for a day/night out,” the Swindon, Wiltshire native described. “It was one of the days we had loads of floods, so a lot of the trains were delayed.”
He claimed that the limited locomotives forced everyone to cram into first class — with some even reportedly sitting on the floor — which made the passengers a bit “peed off.”
That’s when the tipsy passengers devised an unorthodox way to chase away the train delay doldrums.
They reportedly started poking fun at their friend Dan Brown, who reportedly carried puzzles and other miscellaneous objects in his pocket.
“It [the crossword] was from a really old newspaper, it wasn’t a recent one,” described Francis, who said the group started “pretending they didn’t know him.”
The clip starts out typically enough with Brown sitting alone firing off crossword questions as fellow commuters ignore him like a raving lunatic on the NYC subway.
“A style of white mustache, 9 letters?” the impromptu puzzle master barks out to dead silence. “Major river of Venezuela, seven letters?”
Thankfully, after a few more train-teasers, the wait-wearied strangers start to open up and respond to the irrepressible boozer’s clues.
Slowly but surely, the atmosphere changes from that of a typically delayed locomotive to a tavern during trivia night.
“He started doing the puzzle and calling out for answers and the whole train started getting involved,” Francis exclaimed. “To our surprise, there was someone on the train who knew the answer to each of the questions.”
The regional manager added, “Even the questions we didn’t know, there was someone that did.”
He described the spontaneous on-board quiz as a “collective thing,” where everyone from all age groups was “connecting” and “joining in.” In other words, Brown had effectively devised a way to boost brains and morale in one fell swoop.
Needless to say, the unifying incident spawned an overwhelmingly “positive” reaction on social media, according to Francis.
“So much better than everyone ignoring each other like normal!!” fawned one viewer, while another gushed, “How to be drunk, fun and humble.”
A third marveled at the way “he’s connecting everybody.”
One commenter summed it up like this: “Drunk guy unifies everyone. Britain in a nutshell.”
Francis, for one, was over the moon at the response, gushing: “It feels good that we’ve been able to send out so many positive vibes just from one video, I’m kind of overwhelmed with the reaction.”
Here’s hoping they can hire Brown out to Amtrak in the US, which recently experienced a delay so long that commuters called 911 because they thought they’d been taken hostage.