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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.
“When I started the show in 2014, no publicist and no manager would let their talent come on a YouTube show – that was just insane,” she told the Edinburgh TV festival. “I would be banging down the doors, it was just so challenging. Now it’s so fascinating because it’s the opposite.
“If your publicist is coming to you and you’ve got a movie out, or you’ve got an album rollout campaign, now I do think one of the first things up there on the list of things to do would be to come on Chicken Shop Date.
“That has always been the ambition – my ambition – to make it as important as going on Graham Norton or going on Greg James, Radio 1, for example. 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. “I didn’t realise fully how much the audience would catch on to how obsessed he is with me,” she said.
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. Amol Rajan will finish as a presenter of BBC Radio 4’s Today programme this week and launch a YouTube show, The Amol Rajan Connection. The road from TV personality to YouTuber is already well established in the US.
Yet in a media world that continues to converge, Dimoldenberg is moving in the other direction, seeking success in conventional movies and television. She is writing a teen drama for the BBC, similar to the show Skins, which ran for seven series on E4.
She is also writing a Hollywood romcom, in which she will star as a journalist who finds romance with a celebrity after interviewing them. Other than the chicken, it is a plot that sounds close to home.
“It’s a character that I’ve been playing half my life, so I feel like I know it very well,” she said. “It’s definitely just an exaggeration of who I am.”
