Finding Love, One Nugget at a Time

The deep fryer had only begun to sizzle when Amelia Dimoldenberg was informed that her date for the afternoon, a drill rapper named Bandokay, was scheduled to arrive any minute with his girlfriend.

“He’s bringing his what?” Ms. Dimoldenberg asked.

It was an unusually sunny Friday in January when the 28-year-old English comedian and YouTube host prepared to shoot the 58th episode of her popular video series “Chicken Shop Date.” The staff at Morley’s, a fast-food chain restaurant in the sleepy town of Loughton, Essex, looked thrilled. (Ms. Dimoldenberg was famous enough that they had immortalized her in a mural on one of their walls holding a chicken nugget.)

For nearly eight years, over the course of five so-called “seasonings,” she has convened at different fried chicken shops across greater London, mostly with British celebrities — rappers, actors, soccer players and a drag queen named Bimini Bon-Boulash — to film her talk show with interrogation-style questions and deliberate, ungodly silences.

For this one, she came out of the gate strong.

“I heard you grew up on a farm,” she said, sitting across from Bandokay at one of the three tables at Morley’s. “Were you, like, milking cows?” Her eyes looked like they were searching for a fourth wall to break. She had perfected her smile, if you can call it that, by studying Wallace’s labored grimace in Nick Park’s stop-motion comedy franchise “Wallace and Gromit.”

Ms. Dimoldenberg’s interview style offers a softer-edge alternative to an influence of hers, the American comedy series “Between Two Ferns,” in which the actor Zach Galifianakis portrays a version of himself as a public access talk show host who mispronounces the names of his guests and pokes them with invasive, staccato-like non sequiturs. As her conversation with Bandokay wore on, it seemed as though she were reinterpreting the amiable ribbing of Jerry Seinfeld’s “Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee” for a younger audience, and for a British one, the deadpan documentary style of Nathan Fielder’s “Nathan for You.”

With the sheer silliness of her conceit, she tapped into something that Jimmy Fallon and James Corden realized long ago: that a gimmick, whether it’s karaoke on a roulette wheel or in a car, goes a long way. She even has contemporaries in poultry consumption: Sean Evans, the host of “Hot Ones,” in which celebrities attempt to answer questions while eating increasingly spicy wings, and Elijah Quashie, better known as the Chicken Connoisseur for the restaurant reviews on his YouTube show “The Pengest Munch.”

In scripted comedy, Lisa Kudrow in “The Comeback” and Issa Rae in “The Misadventures of Awkward Black Girl” have helped pave a road cobbled together with cringe, but it’s been less traveled by female talk show hosts. “Most women who work in media are beautiful and accommodating and bubbly and personable,” she said. “Now that would be a real performance for me.”

The Secret Sauce

Growing up, Ms. Dimoldenberg had a unique way of introducing herself.

“Hi, I’m Amelia,” she’d say. “I’m going to be the editor of Vogue.” The way some children are known for being strong swimmers or apt students, she was known for her magazine obsession. She often roped her younger sister, Zoe, into posing for shoots she art directed in her grandmother’s back garden.

“Amelia never expressed interest in having a normal job,” said Zoe, 26, who shares a two-bedroom apartment with her sister. “From the beginning, it was always just high-level ambition.”

As is often the case with kids who grow up to become comedians, popularity evaded her until she discovered she was funny. Zoe recalled her sister wearing humor like a “suit of armor, especially among teenage boys, who can be quite awful.” But Ms. Dimoldenberg insisted that her interest in making people laugh was more about strategy than self-preservation. “I was looking at the cool group at school and trying to figure out how to get invited to their parties. It was never going to happen organically, so I made it happen. It’s what I’m doing now with my career.”

It’s also what she’s doing with her love life. These dates aren’t real, of course, but Ms. Dimoldenberg said she believed she would, or at least could, meet her future husband through the show. In that way, “Chicken Shop Date” is a lie that is also true.

“My date with Amelia was actually the first date I’d ever been on, believe it or not,” said the comedian Arnold Jorge, who filmed with Ms. Dimoldenberg in 2016 at the Spicy Grill ’N’ Fried in Bethnal Green. “And where better to do it than at a random chicken shop in East London?”

Jahmek Power, a grime emcee better known by his rap name Jammer, described Ms. Dimoldenberg as “one in a million,” and recalled that their date, at Vallance Grill & PFC in 2015, felt “sensationally interactive.” M Huncho, a rapper who wears a mask in public to protect his identity, described his encounter with Ms. Dimoldenberg at Kasey’s Chicken in 2019 as “awkward.”

“No word suits it better than that,” he said.

Often, the dates don’t go well, which is the point. By contorting herself for our sake into someone who looks out of place in her own skin, she hits a nerve. How she comes across on camera is an exaggeration of who she really is, and perhaps a reflection of how she views herself, rather than a character. In an age of social media hyper-curation, where we share only what we want others to see and double-tap — and even then, through a gauze of selfie filters and effects — we are all, in one way or another, projections of ourselves. For Ms. Dimoldenberg, drawing attention to that artifice is an act of vulnerability, if not defiance. And it’s the show’s secret sauce.

Hazi Adamu, Ms. Dimoldenberg’s former assistant, said, “I’ve only had, like, two good bosses, and she’s probably the top one. She plays up being the weird girl from ‘Chicken Shop Date,’ but it’s not that far from who she is in real life.”

Her aspirations, however, extend far beyond just getting a boyfriend. She has broadened her YouTube channel into a one-stop shop where her audience can enjoy her singular take on romance, current events and even her own cuisine. “I’ve modeled my output so that when I make any mistake it seems like it was intentional,” she said.

On “Amelia’s Cooking Show,” a longer program, she invites outsize personalities such as the TikTok trainspotter Francis Bourgeois to help her prepare a meal, which will inevitably taste bad, using five revolving ingredients. Although she didn’t cite her mother, Linda, a retired librarian, as the model for the show, she acknowledged, “I’m a very plain eater because of how I’ve grown up.” (The only time Ms. Dimoldenberg arrived at Christmas dinner with a head of garlic, her mother made her take it home with her because she didn’t want it in the house.)

Last year, she filmed a vox pop series called “Who Cares?” If the cooking show was inspired by her mother, this one came from canvassing with her father, Paul, a Labour Party member of Westminster City Council. Ms. Dimoldenberg interviewed people on the street to get their takes on topics such as billionaires, the housing crisis, fast fashion and cancel culture. She released it through her new production company, Dimz Inc., labored over the preproduction research and directed it herself. Since she uploaded the last of the series in July, the most watched video has gathered just over 150,000 views, with the others averaging closer to 50,000.

“I was in a funk about it,” Ms. Dimoldenberg said. “I guess I thought that if you’re interested in rap, you’re also probably interested in politics. And if you’re interested in terrible cooking shows, maybe you’ll watch a program about fast fashion. I wanted it to be the opposite of click bait.”

Graduating From Page to Screen

Three days after her date with Bandokay, Ms. Dimoldenberg was standing outside the Stowe Center in Westminster, where, on Wednesdays after school, she worked with other teenagers on a free local magazine called The Cut. It was also where she inaugurated a column called Chicken Shop Date.

Three years into the column’s run, Ms. Dimoldenberg was 20 and working as a runner on the set of a music video. There, she met a camera operator whom she convinced to help film one of her dates. Two weeks after it went up, that first episode, with the rapper Ghetts, hovered at 1,000 views. (It now has more than a million.)

Each time a new video went live, she reached out to different sites, particularly those that focused on the grime musicians she was booking at the time, asking them to cover her show. And each time, they declined. That is, until the prominent digital publisher LADBible agreed to post about her fifth episode, with Asim Chaudhry, a comedian from the hit British series “People Just Do Nothing.” Unsurprisingly, they promoted the release on the back of Mr. Chaudhry’s popularity — “Chabuddy G shows us how a first date is really done …” It has since amassed about 4.2 million views on LADBible’s Facebook page, and nearly 2.9 million views on Ms. Dimoldenberg’s YouTube account.

“There’s a universality to her humor,” said Nina Manandhar, one of the founders of The Cut, who noted that in addition to being funny, there was something democratic, and very specific to London, about shooting in chicken shops.

Mr. Jorge had a similar perspective. “‘Chicken Shop Date’ resonates with the youth so much because Amelia has found a unique way to connect her audience with their favorite rappers, personalities and actors,” he said. “Taking them to a place where many young people go when they’re hungry adds authenticity to it.”

After high school, Ms. Dimoldenberg enrolled at Central Saint Martins. Her first year in the art and design program involved “actually making art,” which proved difficult since Ms. Dimoldenberg can neither draw nor paint. She later ended up specializing in graphic design — “which I can’t do either,” she said — and when the school inaugurated a four-year fashion journalism program, she switched.

The week after her university graduation in 2017, she organized a screening for “Chicken Shop Date.” She’d made her first three episodes with color grading and a sound operator. “That was my real graduation,” she said. “I invited every person in the industry I’d ever met.”

‘My Whole Life Has Taken Place on This One Street’

Perhaps it should come as no surprise that a woman named after Amelia Earhart, or, more specifically, a Joni Mitchell song about Amelia Earhart, should want to shoot for the stars. Walking three and a half miles from the Stowe Center, where she got her start, to Central Saint Martins, where she now ranks among the university’s notable alumni, Ms. Dimoldenberg was reminded of how much she had accomplished in the past few years.

She stopped in front of her parents’ six-story apartment complex on Marylebone Road, where she was born and where her father has lived since he was a college student himself, first in a basement apartment at the back of the building and now on the fourth floor.

Along the way, she passed a floating barge where she attended performances of Punch and Judy, the hospital where she was delivered, a billboard with a model named Nick who used to be her roommate, her primary school, the London Underground Marylebone Station where scenes from “A Hard Day’s Night” were filmed, the church adjacent to her Christian high school where she once performed a solo of “River Deep, Mountain High,” a Madame Tussauds with the recent addition of a Dua Lipa wax sculpture and the imposing Landmark London hotel, where she still fantasizes about spending a night. “It’s wild to think that my whole life has taken place on this one street,” she said.

When she arrived at her alma mater, she was recognized right away. “Love your show!” said a fan. She smiled and thanked him.

Ms. Dimoldenberg began noticing an uptick in the attention “Chicken Shop Date” received, and in turn the attention she was receiving, about three years ago, and credits the shift with what she described as “turning-point episodes,” among them dates with the Oscar-winning British actor Daniel Kaluuya and the American rapper Jack Harlow, both of whom also helped to increase her still-nascent notoriety overseas.

She has said the series will end when her dream guest, Drake, agrees to a date. “He slid into my DMs during my birthday party and wrote, ‘Chicken shop date in Harrods?’ I screamed,” she said. “He’s, like, the most famous man in the world.”

But online fame’s relationship to offline fame can be awkward. For nearly a decade, Ms. Dimoldenberg has built, entirely on her own, an impressive following of British Zoomers. And yet, the many conversations she has had with TV commissioners in the United Kingdom, the ones who determine network programming, inevitably end with the suggestion that she try to expand her reach by doing guest spots here and there. It’s partly why she signed on to host “Celebrity Rebrand,” a six-part digital comedy series in which she attempts to overhaul the public images of existing Channel 4 stars.

“It works in their favor because I’m already known on YouTube,” said Ms. Dimoldenberg, who is writing a series that she likened to “Skins” and “Euphoria.” When asked where she might want that show to live, she admitted to not knowing.

“I’ve got my audience on YouTube, and they aren’t watching as much television,” she said. “Then again, I think once you’re doing both, once you’ve got a great online presence and you’ve got a TV presence, that’s when you’re really winning.”