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Joe Sugg interview: thanks, internet, you made me a star. Now I just want to be the new Brucie
The vlogger is capitalising on last year’s Strictly Come Dancing success with a decidedly old-school variety show. Even the biggest YouTubers want to be on TV
Joe Sugg, whose videos have been watched 2.2bn times, says his success has been like ‘riding a big wave’, which he plans to follow wherever it takes him.
YouTube royalty, millennial heart-throb and — since he finished runner-up in last year’s Strictly Come Dancing — every older viewer’s dream grandson, Joe Sugg is sitting in the Ivy Brasserie in Soho, picking at a bowl of zucchini fries (“What are zucchini? Are they posh cucumbers? No, courgettes!”). He is explaining how much a recent tweet he spotted struck a chord.
“It said, ‘Imagine if at 5pm the internet gets shut off for the entire world and you can’t go on it again until 9am,’ ” Sugg says dreamily. “I love that. I think it would be so good for the world.”
What? Sugg, after all, is the man who — along with a select cohort of vloggers (video bloggers, to any High Court judges) that include his sister Zoe, aka Zoella, and her boyfriend Alfie Deyes, whose waxworks stand in Madame Tussauds — has done more than anything to ruin the eyesight of my generation-Z offspring and have them shun reading Homer in the original and damming streams in favour of gawping at phone clips of their idols’ antics instead.
His videos — such as the one where he “pranks” his best mate, Caspar Lee, by covering his bedroom in Post-it notes — have been watched 2.2bn times by his 27m followers across various social media channels, and the 27-year-old former thatcher is estimated to be worth £4.6m. He has published three bestselling graphic novels, has his own merchandising company and meets “Susan” (that’s Susan Wojcicki, chief executive of YouTube) whenever she’s in town, “to exchange ideas”.
“My life was all about straw but now it’s an empire,” he says in his soft Wiltshire tones, with a total lack of presumption.
Yet, despite personifying the generation gap, there is an endearingly old-fashioned quality to Sugg, who is bequiffed, pipe-cleaner skinny and wearing a cowboy hat and a wealth of silver jewellery. His sweet face looks shocked when I tell him that parents are now setting up Instagram accounts for their foetuses. “That’s so Black Mirror [Charlie Brooker’s tech-dystopia television series] it’s scary. I like human-to-human interaction. It sounds really harsh but when I have kids I’ll be like, ‘You can go on your iPad but you have to build a treehouse first.’ ”
Good luck with that, I think bitterly, as Sugg continues to explain how important his Strictly success was in giving him his TV break. I’m confused: aren’t vloggers intent on crushing the fusty BBC? “A lot of people will tell you TV’s dying, but it’s not true,” Sugg says earnestly, sipping on his elderflower cordial. “Even the biggest YouTubers in the world would like the legitimacy of being a TV star.”
Sugg was clearly shaken by the hostile reaction of some viewers to this upstart dancing alongside such entertainment legends as CBBC’s Dr Ranj Singh and the comedian Seann Walsh.
“Some people said they wouldn’t pay their licence fee if a nobody like me was on Strictly,” Sugg says. “It did feed into the impostor syndrome I sometimes get of, ‘Why me? Why was I chosen for this?’ When I did the Strictly launch, I was like, ‘Oh my God, I’m in a room with Faye Tozer [formerly of Steps] and Lee Ryan [of Blue]. But it made me feel like I was from the traditional world, that I was legit.”
During rehearsals, Sugg fell in love with his professional dance partner, Dianne Buswell. “Dianne’s my first proper girlfriend,” he confirms. At 27? “Other than, like, my pen pal from when I was 10 years old.” Previously, he fretted that a girlfriend might not want their relationship documented online. But Buswell (who has her dancing career to promote) is entirely game, forever appearing in Sugg’s videos, trying to solve his riddles and unpacking the Asos shopping he ordered for her. Recently the couple launched a YouTube cookery channel.
He also worried his fans might give any girlfriend the Yoko Ono treatment. “But luckily they loved Dianne from the very start of Strictly, so when they found out we were together."
Affairs of the heart apart, Sugg tells me delightedly that Strictly transformed his demographic. “It’s completely changed. I get stopped more in supermarkets by the older generation.” On cue, a middle-aged woman swoops down on our table, demanding a selfie.
It’s this grey-pound audience that Sugg is hoping to lure to theatres nationwide with the couple’s Joe and Dianne Show, which kicks off in March and, again, sounds almost defiantly old-school.
“It’s going to be a variety show of music, comedy and dance loosely based on a true love story,” he exclaims. His and Buswell’s? “Potentially,” he says coyly.
There’ll be dancing, singing (“I can hold a tune”) and plenty of jokes. It sounds as if he is positioning himself as a millennial Bruce Forsyth. “I’ve done YouTube tours before and the kids would love them, but I’d look towards the parents and they’d be sitting there looking really confused, like ‘What on earth is going on?’, so this time I want to give them a real performance.”
The son of a property developer and jewellery designer, Sugg left his comprehensive school after A-levels to become an apprentice thatcher, under his uncle Gary. Having always enjoyed making silly films with friends at weekends, he began uploading some onto a newfangled website called YouTube. “It was just a hobby. Then, no one imagined that this could be a career or how far it could go.”
Today, 52% of children say they would consider a career in online videos (just 13% want to be a doctor or nurse). “It’s a great job to aspire to, but they have to realise it’s a very saturated market,” Sugg warns. “We hit it at the right time but to get into it now is very hard.”
By the age of 22, he had 6m followers and a host of advertising and brand agencies clamouring to work with him.
“I was just about to tell my uncle, ‘Look, I’m ready to move on’ when he presented me with this second-hand Postman Pat van that I had to bump-start every morning to help with work. I felt so bad: I didn’t have it in me to say, ‘Thanks for the van but now I’m off,’ so I stayed on working with him for another three months, until my dad broke the news to him. He took it OK.”
Much of Sugg’s charm lies in the Cinderella-like excitement he displayed as he was introduced to a new world of adulation and freebies. “Audiences related to me arriving in a hotel room for an event put on by some company and being ridiculously excited because there were two sinks, or freaking out at being given goodie bags from Harry Potter World.”
Now he lives in a south London riverside penthouse but he still doesn’t appear jaded, saying he hates to jettison any of the tat that brands bombard him with. “I’m very nostalgic — as much as possible I like to keep everything. There’ll come a time when I’m older when I won’t be doing this kind of stuff and then I want to watch back old videos and go through all the stuff I was given.”
This theme of what will happen once his 15 minutes of fame are up underscores our conversation. Already, Sugg has started handing over power to the next generation. Last year, he and Lee set up a talent management company where, as creative director, Sugg comes up with content for the up-and-coming cyber-stars.
“It’s like how songwriters write songs for other people. Sometimes I’ll have a good idea and think: that’d be great for my channel but actually it would probably fit better with someone else. We know we won’t be the most popular YouTubers for ever — even now we’re not, compared to the main ones — but we were pioneers, in the sense that when we started no one else had done the business we’d done, and we can share that knowledge.” His eyes gleam. “My end goal is to create something that doesn’t even need my name attached to it.
“Since day one I’ve seen what I’m doing as like riding a big wave and I’ll ride it wherever it takes me,” he continues. “But if it all fizzles out, I tell my uncle at least I have a skill I can fall back on.”
Strictly and Dianne have unleashed this camp fame hungry guy that he must of kept buried for quite a while !
