YouTube video creators Dan Howell (danisnotonfire), Stuart Ashen (Ashens), Emma Blackery and Phil Lester (AmazingPhil) with some of the cast of kids TV show Knightmare during filming of a special episode that will be broadcast during YouTube Geek Week (Picture: YouTube)

Stuart Ashen has done what millions of us of a certain age could only dream of doing. He has put on the Helmet of Justice. If that means absolutely nothing to you, then you obviously aren’t a fan of Knightmare, the late ‘80s/early ‘90s children’s TV show which captured the imagination of a generation.

In the show, a team of kids about to be bludgeoned by the full onglaught of puberty’s evils had to guide one of their crew through a fantasy realm of dodgy special effects and equally dodgy overacting. And it was brilliant. The catch, of course, was that the team member performing the quest was unable to see where they were going, laden down as they were with a huge double-horned helmet with no eye holes. Kids were a lot tougher back then.



This helmet was bestowed upon the head of Ashen just last week. Ashen, or ‘Ashens’ as he is known to his thousands of fans online, was taking part in a recording of Knightmare which will be broadcast online in a few days as part of You Tube’s inaugural Geek Week, the site’s celebration of comedy, gaming, tech, superheroes, comics and sci-fi.

Ashen, who produces comedy videos and gadget reviews for his 388,000 YouTube subscribers, said stepping on to the original Knightmare set in his home town of Norwich was something special, even if it wasn’t exactly glamorous.


‘It was one of those things I agreed to immediately when they asked,’ he explained. ‘I thought, bloody hell, Knightmare, you don’t turn that down.

‘That was the coolest thing in the world when I was 11 or 12. I think I would have been too shy to have actually gone on it back then. But now I’m 36 I don’t really mind too much.

‘You’re literally standing there with a bucket on your head with very limited visibility while people are telling you to sidestep to your left before a spider eats your legs. It’s almost indescribably strange.’

What is less strange is the rise of the YouTuber. With a dearth of individual voices on television, it was always inevitable that viewers would go elsewhere for new sources of entertainment. Being a YouTuber is now a fairly common career – more than 1m channels on the site are paid for their content. Geek Week merely cements a phenomenon that has been building for the past few years.

Thomas Ridgewell is a digital media producer in London whose YouTube videos – a dazzling mix of live-action comedy and animated antics (if you haven’t yet witnessed the brilliance of Mine Turtle, you need to change your online habits) – have been watched almost 400m times.

He has made a short feature for Geek Week and told Metro we are living in a ‘golden era’ for online content. Even though he’s just 23, Ridgewell, known to his fans as ‘TomSka’, is a YouTube veteran. But does he consider himself to be a geek, whatever that means?

‘I don’t think you could point at a single YouTuber and say they’re not a geek about something,’ he said. ‘We’re all either film geeks or video game geeks. Even the make-up YouTubers, they’re make-up geeks. Everyone on YouTube is indisputably a geek.’ He said the title of Geek Week might rile some. ‘It’s going to probably upset a few geeks who don’t like their word being thrown around.’



YouTube spokeswoman Zayna Aston said: ‘Geek has a slightly amorphous definition but I think it stands for being passionate about something. In a way, I think everyone has an inner geek.’

More than 2m people subscribe to Ridgewell’s YouTube channel. ‘I’ve always wanted to make people laugh and be something on the internet,’ he said. ‘I was making cartoons before YouTube existed. As soon as YouTube came along I bunkered down and said this is what I’m going to do. I do consider myself a scientist before an artist when it comes to making a video. I’m thinking about if it’s going to work before it’s funny, which is probably an unhealthy view to take.’

Musician Alex Day, aka ‘nerimon’ on YouTube, has had a string of Top 40 hits simply because of his channel on the site, which has 713,000 subscribers. His YouTube life got going a few years ago through his highly addictive collection of videos in which he reads the novel Twilight. ‘I was just bored,’ he recalled. ‘I didn’t really think about it in the slightest.’

His approach to his music, however, has been a bit more considered, even if he avoids the usual bland topics you see in the charts and writes about video games instead.

For Geek Week, he and his bandmates in Doctor Who-inspired band Chameleon Circuit have recorded a video of their song, Teenage Rebel. He has no problem with the geek tag.

‘I don’t mind it. There are people who are really, really, really not geeky in the slightest and they’ll say things like, “I’ve just spent too much time playing Temple Run – I’m such a geek!” You’re just a human, you’re fine. You’re not a geek until you’ve owned a Red Dwarf box set or something.’


It’s no surprise then that Red Dwarf actor Robert Llewellyn is also helping out with Geek Week and will appear in Ashen’s new feature, Ashens and the Quest for the GameChild, which also stars Warwick Davis.

Ashen says the secret to a compelling YouTube channel is doing something that is unique.

‘That may not necessarily be content, it can also be personality,’ he said. ‘You hook on to the personality and so you’ve almost got an edge of soap opera to it where you become interested in the person and what’s going on. You feel in some way invested in the person as well as the content and that’s something you very rarely get on television. It’s harder for an individual to shine through in the same way.’

Musician Emma Blackery, 21, from Essex, who has 300,000 subscribers, was one of the YouTubers who helped guide Ashen through the dungeon in the new Knightmare episode.

‘Many years ago, geek meant you were a complete social reject, whereas now it’s almost cool to be seen as a geek,’ she said. ‘What some people would call a geek is what others would call completely normal.’

She swapped waitressing for YouTubing last year and hasn’t looked back, recently releasing an EP.

‘I was stuck in a dead-end job and now my only way of living is making YouTube videos. It’s amazing to actually be able to live just by doing what I enjoy. It is my way of income, it is my living now.’

YouTube’s inaugural Geek Week launches this Sunday and runs until Saturday, August 10. Visit YouTube.com/GeekWeek