The Sidemen Partner with UK's National Film and Television School to Train Unscripted Producers
The Sidemen, one of YouTube's biggest collectives, are teaming up with the National Film and Television School (NFTS) to train the next generation of unscripted television producers in the UK. The partnership, announced on 19 August 2026, embeds the group's production company directly into an academic degree course — a route few digital-native creators have taken.
Every student enrolled on the NFTS's one-year Developing and Producing Unscripted Formats MA will now get a dedicated industry day and a one-week work placement inside Sidemen Entertainment, with access to digital formats and professional production. The programme is called the NFTS x Sidemen Entertainment Unscripted Formats Programme, and the first students to benefit will be those joining the course in January 2027. The application deadline is 3 September 2026. Deadline
The six remaining Sidemen — Simon Minter (Miniminter), Josh Bradley (Zerkaa), Tobi Brown (TBJZL), Ethan Payne (Behzinga), Vik Barn (Vikkstar123) and Harry Lewis (W2S) — carry serious weight in the digital space. Across their platforms they have over 100 million subscribers and more than six billion global views. Their Netflix unscripted show Inside, which the NFTS itself describes as a digital reimagining of Big Brother, saw its third season top Netflix charts in ten countries. Deadline
The partnership arrives during a year of change for the group. KSI (Olajide Olatunji) announced in June 2026 that he was leaving The Sidemen after 13 years with the collective. Earlier in 2026, the remaining members launched Sidemen Productions, taking what Deadline describes as a more targeted approach to digital formats for global audiences. The NFTS deal channels that ambition into training rather than just content output. Deadline
On the NFTS side, the unscripted formats MA runs across six practical modules covering development, casting, shooting, editing and publishing. The school's own course page already references Inside as a case study. Jon Wardle, Director of the NFTS, and Victor Bengtsson, CEO of Sidemen Entertainment, are the two names behind the agreement.
For students, the appeal is straightforward: a placement inside a production company whose Netflix series has demonstrably topped charts in multiple countries. For the Sidemen, it is a way to build a pipeline of producers fluent in digital-first unscripted formats — the kind of content that increasingly sits alongside traditional television rather than below it.
What makes the arrangement unusual is the directness of the link. A one-week placement is modest in duration, but it sits inside a degree course that already treats digital unscripted formats as a serious discipline. The Sidemen are not endowing a chair or lending their name to a building. They are putting their production operation in front of students who are being taught to make exactly the kind of programming they make.
The course starts in January 2027. Applications close on 3 September 2026.
