Just a decade ago, Amelia Dimoldenberg found it impossible to drum up any mainstream celebrities to come on her mock date YouTube show, in which she chats awkwardly with guests over chicken and chips. Even persuading a local actor connected with her London youth club to come on took years of prodding. Managers of A-listers with movies or albums to push instead battled to claim a spot on the hallowed cushions of the primetime TV chatshow sofa.
Yet after those early years of rejection, Dimoldenberg has said that she has reached a watershed moment. Such is the influence of her Chicken Shop Date show, she says it now ranks alongside Graham Norton’s chatshow or BBC Radio 1 for celebrities seeking media cut-through. Now it’s so fascinating because it’s the opposite.
So I’ve achieved that goal.” Dimoldenberg’s rise is a prime example of how digital platforms have radically reshaped the media world, with viewers across all ages switching to YouTube, especially under-35s. Dimoldenberg has shared the ketchup with Ed Sheeran, Charli xcx and Jennifer Lawrence, although Lawrence got Dimoldenberg’s name wrong. Even Paul McCartney turned up for a date in a vegan chicken shop this year, declining Dimoldenberg’s suggestion that he adopt a pet otter.
Dimoldenberg initially focused on interviewing figures from the UK rap and grime scene when she launched Chicken Shop Date in 2014. She secured her first big name, the actor Daniel Kaluuya, because he was a fan of the show. Her interviews have repeatedly gone viral since then, thanks to Louis Theroux rapping or the chemistry between Dimoldenberg and the actor Andrew Garfield.
She is increasingly picky over guests and rejects anyone who wants to be on the show only as part of a “press run” publicising their latest project. It marks a shift in the media hierarchy and underlines YouTube’s muscle. The platform’s rise has become so all-consuming in the TV world that Pedro Pina, YouTube’s head for Europe, the Middle East and Africa, was invited to give the keynote MacTaggart lecture at the Edinburgh TV festival last week, the industry’s most important get-together of the year.
Pina used the speech to insist YouTube was “not the villain” about to destroy the TV industry, though he made clear the age of monopoly for TV networks was over. Sure enough, the temptation of having total creative control – as well as scooping up the ads, sponsors and brand deals that can follow – is now enticing more established media names to try their luck on YouTube. The presenter Holly Willoughby launched her YouTube channel over the summer, amassing 22,000 subscribers so far.
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