Dan and Phil

Daniel Howell (born 11 June 1991) and Phil Lester (born 30 January 1987) are an English entertainment and business duo known for their collaborative work since they met in 2009 on YouTube, television and radio presenting, books, tours, and original films.

Lester uploaded his first video on his channel, AmazingPhil, in March 2006 and Howell on his, at the time danisnotonfire, in October 2009.

The same month Howell uploaded his first YouTube video, Dan and Phil met in person and created their first collaboration, a truth-or-dare style Q&A video Phil is not on fire on Lester's channel, which became a 10-part series with one installment uploaded a year.

Since then, Dan and Phil have frequently appeared in videos on each other's channels.

In 2010, Dan and Phil took part in the live, annual 24-hour internet broadcast "Stickaid", a fundraiser for charity UNICEF.

In 2011, Dan and Phil created a collaborative YouTube channel through the network My Damn Channel.

Titled The Super Amazing Project, it featured the duo discussing and investigating paranormal events.

Segments included "Viewers Spooky Happenings", where the audience of the show would send in "scary" items for the video bloggers to react to, and "In The News This Week", where the duo recapped recent light-hearted news items and viral videos.

Dan and Phil appeared in Benjamin Cook's twelve part 2012 web series Becoming YouTube, and was interviewed on the various topics Cook covered.

In November 2012, the BBC announced that from January 2013 onwards, Dan and Phil would present the Sunday night entertainment and request show for national UK radio station BBC Radio 1.

The duo had occasionally worked with Radio 1 before, making videos for the station's YouTube channel and presenting two Christmas broadcasts.

The show was designed to be an interactive, audio-visual broadcast involving music videos made by viewers, physical challenges performed on air by Dan and Phil, and song requests from listeners.

It was streamed in a video, live on the BBC Radio 1 website, and accessible worldwide.

In 2013, Dan and Phil appeared on Friday Download, a BAFTA award-winning CBBC TV show.

In October 2014, it was announced that as of that month Dan and Phil would not carry on working on The Super Amazing Project in order to concentrate on their Radio 1 show.

Dan and Phil later announced that the Super Amazing Project would be hosted by new presenters, Alastair James Murder and Victoria Atkin, found by channel owners My Damn Channel.

On 12 September 2014, Dan and Phil posted the first video on their new gaming YouTube channel, DanAndPhilGAMES.

In August 2014, it was announced that the last Dan and Phil show would be broadcast on 24 August, with the duo moving to a different show on Monday nights, featuring other popular video bloggers.

From 2014 to 2016, Dan and Phil hosted the worldwide YouTube livestream of the Brit Awards as well as making backstage videos for their channel.

In 2014, Phil Lester's brother, Martyn, co-founded IRL Digital, Ltd., a company that creates and sells the merchandise of various other media personalities, starting with Dan and Phil Shop and branching out from there.

On 1 April 2015, Dan and Phil launched a spin-off crafts-based channel, DanAndPhilCRAFTS, as an April Fools joke.

It featured a single video of them creating square snowflakes out of paper, with an amateur editing style and humour throughout.

It reached over 154,000 subscribers and 500,000 total video views in one week.

On 8 March 2015 the channel hit 1 million subscribers.

It was officially the fastest growing channel on YouTube.

DanAndPhilGAMES reached over 3.1 million subscribers.

Popular recurring and annual series on this channel include their Sims 4 and Google Feud series, Dan vs Phil, Spooky Week, and Gamingmas.

In 2015, Dan and Phil had voice cameo appearances in the UK cinema release of Walt Disney Animation Studios' Big Hero 6 as Technician 1 & 2.

However, this version is not in the UK home release.

That same year, the duo also guest-starred in fellow YouTuber PJ Liguori's online series Oscar's Hotel for Fantastical Creatures, voicing anthropomorphic food items Brie and Rash.

In August 2015, Dan and Phil created an app, The 7 Second Challenge, based on a YouTube challenge started by Lester in a 2014 video on his main channel.

Additional videos were uploaded on April Fool's Day in 2016 and 2017.

This new show was titled The Internet Takeover, and featured Lester alongside Howell live on the first Monday of every month, before coming to an end in April 2016.

In December 2016, Dan and Phil voiced two gorilla princes named Majinuni and Hafifu respectively, in the episode "The Lost Gorillas" in Disney Junior's The Lion Guard.

In December 2018, the channel went on an indefinite hiatus.

On 15 October 2023, Dan and Phil announced that they would both return to making videos on the channel in a parody video titled Saying Goodbye Forever.

For the channel's return, they commissioned a custom lo-fi and synthwave-inspired soundtrack, released as an album titled All or Nothing under the artist name DanAndPhilBEATS in February 2024.

For Lester's birthday in January 2024, the pair hosted a two-hour charity livestream on the channel, through which they raised over $100 thousand for the Palestine Children's Relief Fund.

On 13 June 2019, Howell posted a video on his channel where he came out as gay, and he talked about his experiences growing up in the 90s.

Lester came out by tweet the same day and, the end of June, also made a coming out video where he went into more detail than in his tweet.