The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - The Telegraph Magazine
Ballroom boy
Joe Sugg is a Youtube sensation – but this autumn he will be reaching a whole new audience as he swaps cyberspace for sequins on Strictly.
Louise Gannon puts her name on his dance card
In the middle of a quiet west London street, Joe Sugg is walking towards a coffee shop. He looks nothing out of the ordinary in a comic- book T-shirt and jeans, but something extraordinary happens when he is spotted by groups of teenagers who stand and point, jumping up and down with excitement. ‘It’s him,’ one of them yells as he disappears behind the glass door of the café. ‘Thatcher Joe.’
Sugg, who looks five years younger than his actual age, 27, is the smiley face of a generation gap that has been highlighted by a television show and suddenly made him headline news. But he is living proof that today, success and fame aren’t only about a name, they are also about numbers and – although Strictly is his first venture into prime-time television – in cyberspace, this rather mild-mannered, modest man is a superstar to millions.
‘Who the hell is Joe Sugg?’ he laughs, as he sits down and orders a breakfast tea. ‘I read that a few people had said they weren’t going to pay their licence fee if a nobody like me was on Strictly. Basically, if you are over a certain age, you won’t have a clue who I am, unless you are a relative of mine.’
Sugg is a vlogger, a word that has recently entered the Oxford English Dictionary defined as ‘a person who regularly posts short videos online’. The son of Tracey and Graham Sugg and younger brother of Zoe, aka the fashion and beauty vlogger Zoella, Sugg has turned his Youtube clips into a million-pound business in the space of five years. He runs three Youtube channels (Thatcherjoe, Thatcherjoevlogs and Thatcherjoegames), has published three bestselling graphic novels in his Username series, and runs his own merchandising and his own management company representing new Youtube talent. He also has a production company called Raucous Productions, which has so far made two travel documentaries for the BBC called Hit The Road, in which Sugg and his best mate Caspar Lee travel around the world in a camper van. He has 13.6 million subscribers across his Youtube channels (four million more than the average Strictly audience of nine million) and has attracted almost two billion views.
His core audience, aged between 18 and 24, gives him access to a positive gold mine for advertisers (‘I turn down probably 90 per cent of the offers and deals I get, because they are not always right for my fans’) and a monthly income that hovers around £50,000. A year ago, he bought himself a riverside flat in south London, and he has to choose what time he goes to Forbidden Planet, his favourite London comic shop, to avoid being mobbed. When he and his sister did a SLXPB pop-up in Covent Garden (that’s Sugg Life x Pointless Blog), they had to leave after the swelling crowds caused a security risk.
So, it may be surprising to hear that, when he was approached by the producers of Strictly in March (the children of the show’s hosts, Tess Daly and Claudia Winkleman, are fans) in fact it was Sugg who wasn’t sure it was ‘the right move’. There were no dance tests, no costume fittings, just a discussion about the show, in which he did most of the questioning. ‘I guess someone like me does walk in thinking, “Oh, they are looking to appeal to my online audience,” and how much time will filming take up, how many rehearsals are needed. And then I have to think about how it will impact my actual day job.’
He did his research into a beauty vlogger called Bethany Mota, who appeared on season 19 of Dancing with the Stars (the US version of Strictly), and saw how her digital audience dropped off because she was doing fewer online videos
‘My grandparents don’t totally get what I do, but they’ll be really proud to see me dancing on TV’
(although she did reach the finals of the show). ‘I have no intention of slowing down the number of clips I do,’ he says. ‘So it took me a long time to work out how I could fit in doing both properly.’ After months of persuasive emails and meetings, he was the last to sign on the dotted line. ‘In the end, my decision came down to the most basic one of all,’ he says. ‘Both my nans and my grandad are massive fans. My dad’s mum, Phyllis, danced at Blackpool when she was in her 20s. They don’t totally get what I do, but they will be really proud to see me dancing on the television.’
Before Strictly hits the air, all contestants (they include pop stars Lee Ryan from Blue and Faye Tozer from Steps, newsreader Kate Silverton, cricketer Graeme Swann, documentary maker Stacey Dooley and TV medic Dr Ranj Singh) meet with the Strictly team – including the judges (Darcey Bussell, Bruno Tonioli, Shirley Ballas and Craig Revel Horwood) and presenters – in a dance studio in London.
‘It’s totally overwhelming. I felt I was walking into a new school situation,’ he says. ‘I knew loads of people would have no clue who I was, and then I had people like Lee running up to me saying, “Hey, I know you, my kids love you.” Then there’s a part where you form a huge circle and you do
various steps and keep adding steps – all the time you are being watched, because the producers are seeing who works well together, who has a bit of chemistry, and who can dance.’
He professes not to be too worried about the dancing. ‘I was much more worried about doing the on-camera interviews than getting my steps right. I was thinking all the time about the people who watch me, the people who watch Strictly, how I was going to make it funny like one of my own clips, and how I was going to make it Strictly. I got myself into a complete state about it and ended up saying some rubbish about loving glitter and sequins, which is total nonsense. I hate glitter.’
He has, however, had his first spray tan. He wrinkles his nose: ‘Too orange, do you think? Or can I just about get away with it? I thought if I wore a scruffy old T-shirt, it might detract from the tan.’
Highly likeable, Sugg is strangely shy for someone who has fans throwing themselves at him when he does his tours. He constantly refers to his small, skinny frame. ‘I was the kid at school who would make the joke about himself before anyone else did,’ he says. ‘I was never a loudmouth, I was never the confident one.’ He worries a lot and is haunted by a terror of running out of ‘content’ for his 30-minute films online, which are largely made up of pranks (covering the walls of his flatmate’s room with tinfoil, and prank-calling his parents), day-to-day thoughts, impressions and tips on gaming. Two years ago, he started seeing a therapist to help him work through his anxieties about his business, which was ‘just exploding, to the point where you couldn’t see an end to the possibilities, which is actually quite frightening’.
He doesn’t have a girlfriend because he puts work first. ‘I’m old enough to be married and have kids. I would like that. But I’d have to be very specific, someone funny, someone who understands how important my work is to me. My ideal woman is someone like Mila Kunis.’
Sugg grew up in a Lacock, a picture-postcard village in Wiltshire that has been used as a set for productions from the Harry Potter movies to Midsomer Murders. ‘It was really exciting: me and my sister had little parts as extras, we were totally fascinated by it.’ His mother, Tracey, makes
‘I ended up saying some rubbish about loving glitter and sequins, which is nonsense. I hate glitter’
jewellery, and his father, Graham, is a property developer. Both he and Zoella were encouraged to be creative. ‘We were always making little films together as kids. Then Zoella started making her clips for Youtube when she was a teenager. She was always trying to get me involved, but it wasn’t something I thought I’d be any good at. I was more into skateboarding and filming mad pranks with my mates on our phones.’
After A levels, Sugg decided to work with his uncle, a roof thatcher. ‘Both my uncles are thatchers. I loved it. It’s very physical, very rewarding. And then Zoella got me doing more and more on Youtube. I borrowed her old DSLR [camera] and I started doing my own stuff – copying the sort of things me and my mates loved from the TV show Jackass when we were kids. I also loved Vic Reeves and Bob Mortimer, that mad sense of humour – and I started to get tons of views.’
By the age of 22, he had six million followers. Advertising agencies started contacting him to consult on commercials, and brand agencies wanted him to pitch in with ideas for products. Meanwhile, his uncle had bought him his own van for work. ‘That was awful,’ he says. ‘I didn’t want to let my uncle down, but this thing I did in the evenings or at weekends had just suddenly become massive, and I had to make a decision. My uncle understood. I always tell him if it all falls through, I’ll still need that van.’
A few months after he went out on his own and decided to make the videos his career, he went on a tour of the Philippines with some fellow vloggers. ‘When we landed, we all had calls from the organisers saying we needed to wait on the plane for security. We came out into the airport and there were hundreds of fans screaming our names. We had to get a police escort to our hotel, where even more people were waiting. It was so bizarre. Part of me loved it, because it was like being a pop star. But part of me was thinking, “What the hell have I done?”’
Sugg admits he had no idea how to navigate his own business. ‘I was lucky, in that I could talk to my sister, Zoella, and her boyfriend, Alfie Deyes [Zoella, two years older, had also built her own, phenomenally successful vlogging empire by then; Deyes is a fellow vlogger]. This whole world of Youtube and doing your own channels and connecting with millions of people around the world
‘I was lucky, in that I could talk to my sister, Zoella, about business’
is a bit like being in the Wild West. There’s no map, there are no people who have gone before you and written the business plan, you learn on the job and the first thing you learn is that the people who come first are the people who are going to click on your clip. You have to know your followers.’
He drifts off into what could be a degree-level lecture in analytics, feedback data, approval ratings, branding and interactive content. How do you know all this stuff ? ‘I watch vlogs on it, I click on TED Talk links: it’s all out there online.’ Of course it is.
Dubbed the ‘Youtube equivalent of the Kardashians’, Sugg and Zoella’s parents have been consistently supportive, his father offering financial advice (‘Buy a house’) and allowing their children to do their own thing. ‘I always loved The Osbournes show, and I find the whole Kardashian thing fascinating,’ he says. ‘It never scared me that I was putting myself out there. Most of my early stuff was all based around comedy, so it was a little different. It’s only more recently that I’ve started to talk about more personal things, as opposed to always pranks and impressions.’
There are two subjects he does not go near: religion and politics. ‘Never,’ he says. ‘I just couldn’t go there, and I wouldn’t want to.’ He has never discussed his love life on camera, but one of the clips that drew the most comments (largely from other young men) was an unusually confessional piece in January 2018 about his acne and how he went on the controversial drug Roaccutane to cure it.
‘I’d largely used my sister’s foundation to cover my spots when I was filming, but acne massively affects your confidence. I wasn’t sure whether I should talk about it, because even though I did
make quite a few jokes as I went along, it was more serious than my usual stuff. I showed photos of my skin at its worst and just talked about how it made me feel. I was pretty nervous about putting up that clip, but it got massive amounts of feedback.’
It is now up to Sugg to see how a Strictly sequin will transform him and his multimillion digital status into television stardom. On the show’s Instagram site, his likes (more than 245,000) are more than five times ahead of most of the other contestants.
This could in fact be the smartest step the BBC has ever made on Strictly.
Strictly Come Dancing is on BBC One on Saturday and Sunday evenings from tonight; listen to the Telegraph’s Talking Strictly podcast at talking-strictly.podcast.telegraph.co.uk