Staff writer Charlotte Galea delves into the most recent installment of Chicken Shop Date and begs the question: why are we all so interested in the personal lives of people we don’t know?
Anyone who has been on the internet for these past two weeks won’t have been able to miss the flurry of videos of Amelia Dimoldenberg and Andrew Garfield (The Amazing Spiderman, 2012, tick, tick … Boom!, 2021, We Live in a Time, 2024) that emerged following his recent appearance on her YouTube video series, Chicken Shop Date. Having been thoroughly excited for it myself, I was not disappointed.
Dimoldenberg’s series started in March 2014 and has featured 97 episodes with the same fun, casual interview style presented as a date in a chicken shop. Her outgoing, slightly awkward nature, coupled with the unique character of the interviews is what makes it so popular enough for 2.68 million subscribers.
Excitement for Garfield’s appearance far surpassed that of her previous interviews, as interest has circulated around the pair for a while. Last year, they went viral for a brief but cute meeting on the Golden Globes’ red carpet. Following their Chicken Shop Date, the fan has only been flamed, with Dimoldenberg stating that she shared a ‘secret kiss’ recently.
Having finally loaded up the video after a long day, my expectations were thrown entirely out of the window. Rather than feeling as though I were watching an informal, comedic interview, I felt like a third-wheel. It felt private, and yet, I kept watching.
The interview felt more personal than those before. There is a history between the two, as Dimoldenberg accused Garfield of ‘avoiding [her] for two years because the vibes were too much […] to handle’, and he was irritated that a first date could have been possible outside the Chicken Shop.
Her other interviews centre around the interviewee, but Garfield makes it more about her; about them. He says she’s funnier than him, calls her out on her actions and states clearly how he thinks ‘there’s something going on’ between the them.
But is all this enough to garner this much attention?
The video is barely fifteen minutes long, but it has spawned an overwhelming amount of responses,. After all, it is simply two people talking. So why are we so desperate to listen?
Interest in the personal lives of celebrities is nothing new. Poet Lord Byron was sent locks of hair and mobbed by women in the street during his time, reporters and fans sought the autograph of actress Sarah Bernhardt in the late 19th century and in the 1960s, teenage girls lined up in droves to catch a glimpse of the Beatles. Bridgerton-watchers constantly swapped TikToks of Nicola Coughlan and Luke Newton during the spring, and I have even heard from friends about how they would enter a brief, but painful, mourning period if Tom Holland and Zendaya broke up.
We scour our favorite song lyrics for hints as to who they are about, we comb press tours of chemistry-fuelled costars – we are fascinated with the lives of celebrities, and have been since celebrity was invented. But why?
Many argue it is about idolisation. The rise of social media has meant that ordinary people are allowed access to celebrities more than ever before, and with it we are able to idolise them more than ever before. When it comes to the relationships of celebrities, we seek a kind of relatability in watching someone we feel that we know go through a breakup, or else we romanticize the relationship itself.
Amber Bentley states that there are two alternatives: ‘Either we are jealous and yearn to see the fall of our least favourite celebrities from stardom; or […] we admire these individuals so much that we want to become them and emulate their lifestyle.’ While I do believe these are certainly aspects of the obsession with celebrity relationships, I think there is another variable, as well: simple nosiness.
We are fascinated by other people – they intrigue us. We love to ‘people watch’, strike up conversations with strangers and read the Metro Rush Hour Crush for entertainment. We are inherently nosy voyeurs, in a way, obsessed with each other, not only because we are devourers of gossip, but because the idea that other people, especially those we idolise, may experience the same things we do, is all at once both comforting and thrilling
The street where I grew up is full of ordinary people who open their curtains when a car rolls down the street, who open their doors when they spot an emergency service. They take their children to school each morning, and head into the office, they do the housework and the chores. They complain about each other to each other, they put the bins out and pull them back in. At the weekends they get a takeaway if they can afford it, set multiple alarms for Monday and they get up and do it all over again.
Their nosiness, although it looks bad, is part of what makes them know they are not alone. Having moved to London, a sprawling city where everyone ignores one another, I find the former to be preferable. Nosiness and gossip come from a desire to know each other, to be able to help each other, and to feel part of something bigger than ourselves.
In these nosy moments, we are reminded of other lives outside of our own, reminded that we are not the only ones living. The peak we get into celebrity lives is simply another addition of our love of ‘people watching’. It’s entertaining and comforting to know that other people, especially those much more well off than ourselves, experience similar things that we do. They go through similar embarrassments, they have known heartbreaks, they have struggled financially. It reminds us we’re not alone, but also that things can get better than they are.
The latest edition of Chicken Shop Date and the flurry of interest that it has received displays this plainly. In a video consisting of barely fifteen minutes, viewers were let into the lives of these two people, whom we know have a shared, possibly romantic past, and watched as they casually flirted and joked with one another.
Watching them, viewers can pretend they know their relationship, they can romanticise it for themselves. But on a less serious level, they can do the inherently human thing: be nosy.
