Lunch with a YouTube Legend: Geriatric1927

Early this week, I was very excited to have the opportunity to meet up with 82 year old YouTuber Peter Oakley, aka Geriatric1927. I left London early on Monday, travelling north into the heart of Middle England to hear Peter’s pearls of wisdom on the internet, online video and senior surfers.

As many will know, Peter is a true online video celebrity: creating his first YouTube video on 5^th August 2006, he shot to the #1 spot on YouTube within the week, receiving international media coverage not only in the early view-booming days, but also when his microwave meal ‘cookalong’ hit proved more popular than Gordon Ramsay’s. Geriatric1927 currently has over eight million upload views, and I was delighted to speak to the person behind the channel on Monday about his life, his motivations, his passions, his fame and of course, his videos. Here are some of the highlights.

Why YouTube?

Of course the first thing I asked Peter about was how he got in to YouTube in the first place. He explained that after becoming a widower, he wanted to access the world, meet new people and find penfriends – but without disrupting his ‘reclusive life’ behind the screen. The internet was a natural choice, and he started off in chatrooms – but soon realised they were almost exclusively full of teenagers and not quite the right environments for him.

Peter has always been an adventurous person, keen to tackle new and unusual challenges. When he was in his 60s, he took an Art GCSE course at the local secondary school in a class of 15 and 16 year olds, and went on to complete his A Level and Art Foundation courses in similar youth environments: communication with young people has been something he’s enjoyed for years. His interest in art and photography soon led him to research video and see what he could do with that. He sat down at his computer in August 2006 to Google ‘video’, and suddenly found himself in the middle of the world of YouTube. The first thing he did, once he realised his computer already had the software he needed to create video, was upload one of his own to test the waters. Of course, that’s when the media picked it up, and the rest is history!

Who is Geriatric1987?

While the sudden influx of media attention was worrying for Peter from a privacy perspective, he explained, ‘The Daily Mail used the headline ‘The Internet Grandad’, and I have adopted that character as my own ... many young people speak to me in the way they would to their own grandad if they were able to, telling me their worries’. He maintains a dialogue with many of his virtual ‘grandchildren’ and values their friendship – the headline attached to his first ever upload really has shaped his online persona.

Geriatric1927 has a wide audience spectrum: youngsters watch, middle aged people watch, and of course ‘us old YouTubers all watch each other’. Peter is a great advocate of intergenerational communication, and sees the internet as a way to bridge the gap between generations, allowing sharing, collaboration and communication between young and old.  As well as maintaining a dialogue with young people in a grandad-style capacity, he has also encouraged older people to tackle the medium and the space, collaborating with Bruce of the You Are Never Too Old Technology Company in the US,  and with the UK government’s Digital Inclusion project, whose aims include increasing the number of older people using broadband.

Silver Surfers

Increasing the number of older people online is one of Peter’s greatest challenges, and he believes the solution will often require the one-to-one efforts of family members, appealing to his YouTube audience to help their parents and grandparents to feel comfortable online. His view is that the greatest challenge for the elderly online is the Fear Factor: ‘they are afraid of the internet ... it all seems too complicated; like there is so much to learn’. He often uses a car analogy when introducing people to computers – ‘you don’t have to know the mechanics of how a car works to drive one. Computers are similar’.

Peter spoke of the great importance communication has for older people, and the ways that the internet can facilitate this conversation, ‘the internet is great for communication. For example, Skype, YouTube – these things are wonderful’. He is a huge advocate of giving older people the opportunity to discover the opportunities that exist online, and he believes the steps brands are currently taking to open up services for the elderly online can’t be anything but positive. You can read more about this in the next post, Geriatric1927 on Silver Surfers.

Thank you, Peter, it was a pleasure to chat with you!