Don’t Hug Me I’m Scared is a YouTube phenomenon. Created in the vein of innocent children’s programming, over the course of each short episode, the action always descends into mind-bending, hilarious terror. The nightmarish combination of puppets, sing-along tunes and raw meat has helped them notch up 100 million views and 900,000 subscribers on YouTube.

Our guest on Crowd Scene today is Ben Lole, a London-based creative producer who is part of the core team behind Don’t Hug Me, I’m Scared. Ben’s here to explain how on earth this ever get made…

In 2014, after making two episodes on their own, the team turned to Kickstarter in order to raise enough money to create four more. In 29 days they raised £105,000 – that’s about $150,000 for you Americans – from 3,500 backers.

In the news we talk about ARKYD – a $1.5m Kickstarter campaign that just refunded its 17,000 backers three years after raising enough money to put a telescope in space.

As always, please help us out by writing a friendly review of this show on iTunes. In return for each review, Mike will personally come to your house and perform a scene-for-scene re-enactment of the movie ‘Titanic’. Show notes on crowdsceneshow.com