Lifestyle

The Big ES Friday Night In: Who is… Amelia Dimoldenberg?



From flirting to free breadsticks, the reasons we Londoners hop, skip and drag ourselves out on dates are pretty varied, it has to be said. For Amelia Dimoldenberg, the journalist, content creator and founder of YouTube series Chicken Shop Dates, it’s all about grime, fried poultry and bringing in her bread and butter. Which, thanks to coronavirus, is on pause for the foreseeable.

Now, as I chat to Dimoldenberg on a Zoom conference call, she tells me that like the rest of us, life feels out of sorts. Her work has been cancelled, she’s only ever dressed from the waist up and she’s relying on her Instagram community for non-triggering news stories. Plus, there’s not a chicken shop open in sight.

Pre-pandemic, Dimoldenberg spent six years developing the Chicken Shop Dates series from a column she created at a youth club magazine — ‘because I wanted to go on dates’ — into a household name. Now, she schmoozes both single and spoken-for grime stars, actors and TV personalities (think Dave, Daniel Kaluuya and Maya Jama) over boxes of fried food at chicken shops across the capital. Filled with awkward silences and pointed questions, her videos have racked up tens of tens of millions of views, and have since landed her jobs creating documentaries for Vice and Channel 4, as well as presenting gigs for Amazon Music and Wireless music festival.


Unable to pinpoint the moment her television work started rolling in, the writer cites getting an agent as a major turning point.

Newly represented and riding the wave of royal wedding hysteria, Dimoldenberg pitched Meet The Markles to Channel 4 just before Harry and Meghan got hitched. ‘I think it was the combination of my work for Vice, which was a bit serious, and the humour of Chicken Shop that caught the attention of the commissioner,’ she says. Tasked with hassling members of the Markle family for an invitation to the wedding, Dimoldenberg found herself knife throwing, at a marijuana festival and talking to Meghan’s half-sister in cockney rhyming slang. Needless to say, it was an instant hit.

Since then, however, it hasn’t always been plain sailing, says Dimoldenberg. ‘Honestly, in hindsight I’m surprised they took that because it’s so hard to get commissioned if you’re a new talent in television. I’m so grateful that it happened, but I think it has a lot to do with the fact that it had a time limit, so we had to go and do it immediately. I’ve been trying to do more ever since and it can be so slow.’

Plus, she says, navigating the difference between producing your own entertainment and the corporate world of broadcast can be a struggle. ‘It’s an interesting process as a content creator. I’m used to taking things into my own hands and commissioning myself to create content. The world of TV is so different because it’s a whole different process, there is so much bureaucracy. It’s interesting. I enjoy having creative control over my own YouTube channel — I think if I didn’t have that it could get frustrating.’

No stranger to the hustle, Dimoldenberg says getting stars to agree to nuggets and chips can also be a bit of a process. ‘Lots of artists come on because they like the show, but it can still take me two years to get some people. Santan Dave took me like two years. Big Narstie took me three years of emailing every now and again. I met him backstage at a gig and even then it took another year or so.’

Even so, this week she released her second most requested video to date (Stormzy is the person her followers most want her to take on a date, FYI) with YouTube mavericks Chunkz and Yung Filly. And although she has no intention of breaking into a chicken shop any time soon, Dimoldenberg has plans to take her dates to Instagram Live, at least for now.

Aware that streaming isn’t a long term solution, Dimoldenberg is using her time to check in on her 89-year-old neighbour, develop new content ideas and look after her mental health. ‘Luckily this has come at a time when my mental health is back on track. I had been really struggling, but with the help of a counsellor I’ve managed to get to a place where I’m a lot happier in myself,’ she says.

As one of the voices of the millennial generation, she realises the importance of staying in touch with her digital community, too. ‘I know that for so many people this situation will be a real triggering moment, whether it’s staying inside, boredom or their lack of income. So I think it’s really important to stay connected and for people to be sharing their views of how things are going. That is what helps me — listening to how other people are finding things and realising, thank god, that I’m not the only one.’

With dates off the cards, does Dimoldenberg think love has the chance to thrive during corona? She hasn’t entirely given up hope. ‘I am just ready to start dating again and, like, now we’re in lockdown. The only way I‘m going to meet someone is if I catch eyes with them on a run. But I really don’t like runners, they are one of the types of people I like the least. I don’t get running. There are flats opposite me so I hope there will be a hot guy staring out the window and we can have a relationship where we hold notes up to each other. I don’t know, I think there is going to be a lot of texting. Tinder and Bumble are going to be thriving.’

For Dimoldenberg, living with housemates takes some of the sting out of isolation. And when it comes to keeping herself entertained, the content creator has fun dying her hair pink, draining large glasses of rosé and rewatching High School Musical and Hairspray. Plus, the comedy queen is hosting the first ever #TheBigESFridayNightIn pub quiz live on the @eveningstandardmagazine Instagram at 8PM GMT tonight. See you there.





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