Grimewatch
Gary Scott is a car-cleaning guru whose down-and-dirty YouTube videos attract millions of views. John Evans meets this top grime-buster and gets some expert tips
PHOTOGR APHY JOHN BRADSHAW
I magine filming yourself cleaning your car and posting the result on YouTube. How many views do you think you’d get? Half a dozen? A couple of hundred at a push? Five years ago, Gary Scott did exactly that, filming himself on his phone cleaning a Ford S-Max. He edited the video and then asked a mate to help him upload it. A couple of months later, the pair were having a drink in the pub when Scott’s friend revealed the video had notched up one million views.
“I was stunned,” he says. “One million views of a bloke cleaning a car! I couldn’t believe it but it was the spur to post more videos of me doing the same thing.”
‘Dirtiest car ever?’, ‘Cleaning a disgusting smoker’s car’, ‘Filthy BMW’, ‘Dirtiest Mazda big clean’… The titles of the other 100 or so YouTube films Scott has made since that first S-Max video won’t win prizes for originality but at least viewers know what they’re getting: typically, 30 minutes of Scott painstakingly transforming a car from a toilet to a thing of beauty in a process he calls ‘disaster detailing’.