Half-Asleep Chris: The YouTuber Who Sent a Rollercoaster to Space

Chris Burton has accumulated a billion views on YouTube. His channel, Half-Asleep Chris, films cats, elaborate homemade contraptions and theme park rides that travel to the heavens and around his back garden.

The Guardian visited Burton at the suburban house where all of it happens. He is currently redecorating, for two reasons. The first is sad: his cat Bella died recently, aged 17, and Burton needs a new carpet after the indignities of her old age. The second is characteristically ambitious — he is converting his dining room into a recreation of London's Rainforest Cafe, which closed in 2023.

The project will include temple walls, a talking tree, a fish tank and fronds. Thunderstorms will roll through every 20 minutes.

"He's doing most of the work himself," the Guardian reports, as the interviewer edges past an 8ft fibreglass tapir standing in the hall. Burton will call in an electrician to rig the starry ceiling and a plumber to check the waterfall for leaks.

The tapir illustrates the channel's method. Most viewers will only see it on screen, never touch it, yet the animal has exactly the same amount of give as — as the interviewer imagines — the real deal: firm yet squishy, foam and five layers of silicone over a steel frame. The Guardian calls this refusal of half-measures "very Half-Asleep Chris."

Bella, who died at 17, became a star through the channel's videos, alongside the loopy contraptions and rides that made Burton's name. The cat's death and the Rainforest Cafe recreation now mark a turning point in the house where the billion-view output is produced.

Burton has also spoken about the platform that made him famous. "It's frustrating to see immoral videos do so well," he told the Guardian — a comment that sits uneasily beside the painstaking, hand-built quality of his own output.

The full interview, published by the Guardian on 1 October 2026, details the tapir, the dining room jungle and the scale of a channel that turned a suburban home into a production studio. As Burton rebuilds his house around Bella's absence, the next phase of Half-Asleep Chris — thunderstorms included — is already under construction.