‘It’s frustrating to see immoral videos do so well’: how YouTube sensation Half-Asleep Chris sent a rollercoaster to space and made Bella the cat a star

His videos of cats, loopy contraptions and theme park rides round the heavens (and his back garden) have notched up a billion views. We meet Chris Burton in the suburban home where it all happens

C hris Burton is getting ready to redecorate his house. The first reason for this is quite sad. His beloved cat Bella died recently, aged 17, and the indignities of old age mean a new carpet is in order. The other reason is that Burton, AKA Half-Asleep Chris, is turning his dining room into a recreation of London’s Rainforest Cafe (also RIP, it closed in 2023). There will be temple walls and a talking tree, a fish tank and fronds. Thunderstorms every 20 minutes.

He’s doing most of the work himself, he explains, as we edge past an 8ft fibreglass tapir in the hall. But he’ll need an electrician to rig the starry ceiling and a plumber to check the waterfall for leaks. I sneak a feel of the tapir: firm yet squishy, foam and five layers of silicone over a steel frame. Most people will only see rather than touch it, yet it has exactly the same amount of give as, I imagine, the real deal. This lack of half-measures is very Half-Asleep Chris.

The videos are mostly about his cats. Or Lego. Or a combination of the two. Or loopier contraptions he finds creatively fulfilling yet usually prove to be of more niche appeal. “It’s very important to me not to be driven by videos that will perform well,” he says. “But usually, the longer I spend on something, the fewer people watch it.”

He spent 14 months, off and on, constructing a jungle boat ride through his garden that has notched up 9.1m views, five times fewer than a video in which he plays hide and seek with Bella and fellow cat Ralph , which got 49m views. (Kitten Henry joined the family last year.) He sent a working Lego rollercoaster into space , which “took months and had loads of people involved, and it’s amazing ”. But while that has 2.4m views, Giant Cat Destroys Lego City (basically just Bella inspecting one of his glorious model villages ) has 21m.

Who watches the videos? About 45% of his audience are in the US, another 10% from the UK, with Canada, France and the Philippines following behind. Data protection makes it hard to tell what proportion are children, but he does know his biggest demographic is 25 to 40-year-olds, ie, those most likely to be fairly new parents. His hope is that the videos encourage co-watching.

“It’s hard to tell,” he says, “because I think an adult is less inclined to draw a picture of your cat and send it to you. But I want my videos to be family friendly. Nothing rude or obnoxious but not dumbed down. Children can learn and infer a lot more than we give them credit for. But a lot of content is patronising, and that’s a great loss. It’s very much about the most popular thing, which is often the most excessive or in-your-face.”

Burton keeps more distance. He is gentle, geeky, self-effacing: an anti-Blippi. Think Tony Hart or Mister Rogers, but young, with cats. His videos are kind and silly, with whimsical theme tunes and unambitious stopmotion graphics. There is charm and the cast-iron certainty that, should you stop co-watching for a bit to see to the peas, your child will be in safe hands.

Does he consider himself a role model? “Absolutely. The version of yourself you put in a video is job interview best-behaviour. But it’s very important. A lot of YouTube content that appeals to children is awful and you wouldn’t want your kid to watch it. A lot of the big names are big because they’re outlandish and I don’t think their content has any value whatsoever.” He chucks Henry a ball. “It’s frustrating watching videos that are so immoral do so well.”

The calm, articulate version of Burton that he puts forward today seems, in most ways at least, identical to the job interview version. It’s the school holidays and I’ve brought my nine-year-old son Laurie along; Burton answers his questions with patience and respect, before handing him lollipop sticks and a spatula.

With these, Laurie has a crack at one of the activities from Burton’s first book, The Unordinary Book of Ideas: Everywhen Projects for Rainy Days. Some of these have been trialled in videos ( massive domino run round your house using household items ; fiery obstacle course for a remote control car ); others (make your own transit map, track your life in strange statistics) not yet. The manual also represents a manifesto against the perils of modern-day childhood. It seeks to stretch attention times. Many activities require a day to complete, others rather longer, in theory, the stone circle one needs 4,000 years.

Sometimes phones are used to film things, but otherwise it’s rigorously luddite, a celebration of the homemade that delights in domestic detail. “Things can seem mundane now, but one day they’ll seem remarkable,” says Burton, getting out his collection of unusual paperclips. He’s particularly keen on coins, banknotes and stamps, tactile markers of a country’s self-projection. One activity involves resending vintage used postcards. “Something like a third of kids in the UK have never sent or received a letter,” he says, “and last year the Danish postal system closed down after 400 years. We should grieve for it.”

Burton’s fame may have digital origins, but his allergy to TikTok is pronounced and AI brings him out in hives. “It’s awful and dangerous. It doesn’t teach you anything. So much of a project is the journey. With the Rainforest Cafe, I have a very clear idea in my head of how it’s going to go. But it’s not going to go like that. It’s going to go wrong. I’m going to have to learn loads of random skills I didn’t anticipate. But AI is just A to B.”

Yes, there’s a data-entry benefit, he concedes, but “AI shouldn’t be anywhere near creativity or art”. On Ralph’s last birthday, among the sketches and paintings sent in were a couple of AI-generated cards. “That’s so sad,’” he says, shaking his head. “It’s heartbreaking.”

Burton’s strong and sometimes surprisingly stern moral core comes, he says, not from “a particular set of beliefs” but rather a sense of the importance of “doing the right thing, being a kind person and making something that isn’t awful”. After university, he worked in a clothes store, which he hated, then part-time in a travel agency, which he liked. He began making videos “very arrogantly, because I saw a lot of people doing it and thought I could do it a lot better”.

After quite a lot of content about foreign currency, he began his Lego binge series. He doesn’t do those now, he says: too clickbaity, too much conspicuous consumption. And indeed the likes of I Built 250 Lego Sets in 24 Hours (16m views) do feel discordantly grabby next to, say, I Picked up a Ton of Trash (Literally!) (8m views).

Burton is not sanctimonious, yet his conscience is something of a selling point. “I find it very frustrating when YouTubers encourage you to donate and don’t donate anything themselves. When you go to Tesco and they want you to round up for charity, they’re taking credit without donating anything themselves. That’s not really a good deed. You need to lead by example.” So the jungle boat ride video includes a brief explanation of the clean-water crisis in Cambodia, to which Burton duly donated enough to fund a whole school.

Profits from Bella plushies, meanwhile, have been diverted to the RSPCA since her death. Announcing that to his fans was a challenge, he says: “I knew I was going to make a lot of people very sad.” Thirty-three thousand bereft YouTube comments prove him right.

Stepping into Burton’s house is an odd and exciting experience. All around are familiar sights and previous projects: the catio ! The cat mansion ! The ceiling train ! But there is also evidence of life that doesn’t make it into shot, and the shock of this is testimony to his broadcasting skills. The intimacy he projects on screen is genuine, yet it’s also curated. His world, it turns out, is richer than cats and Lego alone.

“I’m kind of strict with privacy, and people seem to not see this because I involve the cats and that seems hyper-personal. But there are certain rooms that are never filmed in and a lot of other personal details I don’t talk about, or emotions, or any kind of relationships or family life.”

This is something he learned on the job. A former girlfriend featured in some of his previous videos; when they broke up, Burton felt the need to issue a statement, including details on custody of the cats. “It creates something awkward,” he says. Viewers “feel they have the right to know and I guess they do have a right to know because you’ve kind of shared that. But it’s unfair on other people. I’ve chosen to be in the public eye but they haven’t, and I need to protect their privacy.”

Cats don’t care what strangers project on to them, he says, but humans are less immune. “I’m massively against kids being in YouTube videos. I think it’s an exploitative thing by the parents. Christopher Robin grew up to really hate his dad. He resented that he’d sold out his childhood.”

It’s time to leave. Burton ushers us out, past an Aardman-themed bathroom and giant 3D printed Lego bricks. What’s next? After the Rainforest Cafe, there are plans for a train around the garden that will navigate a greenhouse, mushroom tunnel, giant sandcastles and jets of coloured water.

And then? “A claw-machine litter tray,” he grins. “I think these inventions are often best when they’re a little impractical.” The carpet-fitters may need to plan a return visit.