It’s a fantasy for many of us, having dinner with your favourite celebrity, but Amelia Dimoldenberg has worked to make this fantasy her reality. Her YouTube series Chicken Shop Date sees her interview celebrities in the format of a ‘date’ and is a breath of fresh air in the age of overproduced celebrity interviews.
Taking place in chicken shops around London, these are not your usual celebrity interviews. Dimoldenberg describes herself as ‘refreshingly awkward’ in her YouTube bio and prides herself on her awkward persona and deadpan humour. She actively tries to weird out her ‘dates’ by asking them questions they don’t expect.
For example, she gives Ed Sheeran her bedsheets so he can have sheets that smell like her and not another woman (like in his song ‘Shape of You’), and asks Paul Mescal the question we’ve all been wanting to know the answer to: how he got his thighs.
As a result, she reveals a side to these celebrities that we don’t usually get to see. Instead of parroting their usual pre-rehearsed answers to questions, we see them squirm under Dimoldenberg’s unwavering gaze, and engage in the playful banter there isn’t the time for on TV interview shows. We also get to see which celebrities aren’t that funny (Matty Healy, I’m looking at you).
While it might seem like an overnight success, Chicken Shop Date has been years in the making. Originally a column in The Cut, a London youth magazine, Dimoldenberg brought it to our screens during her Fashion Communication degree at Central Saint Martins.
Her hard work has paid off: since starting the series over 10 years ago, she’s accumulated 2.73 million subscribers on YouTube. With previous guests including AJ Tracey, Sabrina Carpenter, Lando Norris, Raye, and Cher, Chicken Shop Date has gone from strength to strength, becoming an established part of the celebrity press run and as coveted as the likes of The Graham Norton Show.
Her latest ‘date’ with Andrew Garfield has fans in a spin because they allude to a real-life romance. Garfield talks about the possibility of the pair going on a real date, despite Dimoldenberg’s insistence that it is a real date, leading to many Fleabag-esque moments as Garfield takes a sledgehammer to the fourth wall. For once, it is Dimoldenberg who is flustered and on the back foot, not her date. The result? 11 minutes of unmissable viewing.
Like any great artist, Dimoldenberg has her naysayers, with some people claiming that they ‘just don’t get it’. But the beauty of Chicken Shop Date is that there is nothing to get. The conversations never really lead anywhere – even the ones that seem like they’re leading somewhere are ended by cut-aways to footage of the chicken shops – but they aren’t supposed to be profound and jaw-dropping. They’re more like the witty banter you share with strangers on a night out, a bit of fun in the moment, nothing more nothing less.
We live in a world that is over-saturated with content creators vying for our attention – Chicken Shop Date actually deserves it.
Chicken Shop Date is available on YouTube.
