. Hosted by Karl Smallwood, with video editing courtesy of Brad Rawlinson, with other friends of theirs showing up on occasion. They essentially makes longer form videos of already existing articles found on their own website.There are three formats of videos currently:
- Fact Fiend: The regular videos on a topic chosen from their site, or Karl has otherwise found funny.
- Wiki Weekends: Karl and company trawl through a random wiki page (often related to comic books) and read aloud some of it's best moments, such as oddly-specific details on character pages and their awesome codenames.
- Fact Fiend Focus: A more laid back look into a particular topic.
The videos tend to have Karl and the off-camera editors express opinions related to the subject at hand, which don't fit well on the articles on the site. This almost always leads them onto a tangent or seven. As part of their videos, they often insert relevant pop-culture Film/ TV show clips to use with their discussions to give visual shorthand on whatever they talk about (or if they refer to a film or show directly.)
They also have a sister channel "Fact Fiend Leftovers, where they uploaded much longer versions of their main Fact Fiend topic videos, but completely raw (as in, almost no editing and post-production, leaving in their Hilarious Outtakes whenever they mess up), though consistent uploads for it ceased mid-2023.
As with a lot of creators, the show was impacted by the COVID-19 Pandemic, and the crew that often ask questions to Karl (Lucas and Nisha) were forced to call in from their homes to continue this role.
The Youtube channel has entered an indefinite hiatus, primarily because Karl has gotten tired of maintaining the channel and wants to move onto other avenues of digital content creation. The videos will remain up for the foreseaable future, however. Their first project is Wiki Weekends, a more long-form podcast hosted by Lucas Holland (editor of this very channel), with Karl acting as a co-host, and is essentially a longer, unscripted version of the videos of the same name that appeared on this very channel.
Fact Fiend contains examples of:
- Achievements in Ignorance: In the video on Nintendo's unbreakable products, they read out an example of a Gamecube being set on fire, and the framerate of the game goes up, apparently working better under pressure.
- Biting-the-Hand Humor: Has a tendancy to call out Youtube for the changes in how creators use their platform. He intentionally works around Content ID so said claimants don't get any revenue, and was genuinely furious when Youtube had the gall to add mid-roll ads to his videos, to which he paid one of the editors out of pocket to remove them.
- Black Dude Dies First: Discussed in the appropriately named That Time Fox Killed Off Marvel's Unkillable Mutant where Karl points out that Darwin, a mutant who adapts to survive, and considered to be the most powerful non-deity person in the Marvel Canon, and yet, somehow; Fox not only performed a Race Lift on the character, but Darwin dies within the first five minutes of X-Men: First Class by being force-fed an energy ball, which his body cannot seemingly adapt to (despite comics repeatedly showing that he can survive pretty much anything).
- Camera Abuse: A very downplayed example. A few of their videos, such as this one have the camera be completely out of focus, with Karl being very blurry. They couldn't fix it in editing (as you can't add detail the camera didn't capture), but made the video nonetheless. Makes it looks like Karl is censoring himself.
- Catchphrase: Karl has a tendency to say "Big Dicked Hero" when describing someone's heroic deed, normally in relation to people doing heroic things behind someonee elses back.
- Clip Show: "Best moments of Fact Fiend", released on Christmas day, 2020. Karl and Far-away Nisha admits the episode exists because anything released on Christmas day is basically sentencing it to death in terms of revenue. Karl also lampshades the fact that these don't take long to edit as they also reveal that it also existed to give the editors (Nisha and Lucas) some more money, which Karl is more than happy to give them as a form of a Christmas bonus. The moments in the video were chosen by a poll Karl ran on Twitter.
- Cool Car: The topic of "The President's Car is Full of Shotguns" video basically describes some of the (supposed, due to the actual plans being a secret service secret) security features the President's car has. The Tires are bulletproof, slash-resistant, and failing that, they are designed to work without rubber anyway, a gas canister hidden in the car provides oxygen in case of a gas attack, and, of course, the car has shotguns in it as a last resort so the Secret Service can protect the president. Karl points out that the shotguns seem like overkill, given all the other security measures the car has.
- Cut Lex Luthor a Check: In this video Karl points out Lex Luthor and his claims of curing cancer make him super smart in the comics, with hum building robots to punch out Superman, while simultaneosuly, never giving the proper authorities access to his technology.
- Destroy the Product Placement: The topic of this video discussing the Lamborghini that appears in the Doctor Strange (2016) film. Karl points out the only stipulation Lamborghini had in order for the car to feature, was to make sure it was Strange's fault that he crashed, not the Lambo's, as the company pointed out the car has passed rigorous safety tests and that it wouldn't look good for them.
- Disproportionate Retribution: In this video on amusing snooker rules, Ronnie 'o Sullivan got called out by a referee for having his shirt untucked.
- Early-Installment Weirdness:
- The earliest episodes didn't have Karl holding a cup or bottle.
- The green screen that has relevant images displayed behind Karl didn't have words on it until the video the blink-182 video.
- The title card used to be Red (as shown above), but turned green starting from the video Abusing Vodafone's Test Drive, with the subtitle underneath reading "(Look! It's green now!)".
- Flair Bartending: A minimal version. Karl sometimes flips a bottle or does other tricks while talking. This is because he was a bartender at one point before doing Youtube.
- Formula-Breaking Episode: This video Karl uploaded called "Important Channel Update". To put it kindly, he condemned any person who voted for Trump in the 2020 election, and cracks open a beer while telling them to not watch their videos. The greenscreen is also missing, with it being replaced with a "The Green Screen" paper sign.
- Freud Was Right: Karl has a tendency to discuss penises on the show, such as in the Spore video, or the Nolan Batman Trilogy Music video.
- Fun with Subtitles: The title card has a joke or quote related to the topic in brackets underneath the title.
- George Lucas Altered Version: Discussed in this Wiki Weekends video that is all about the many many edits George Lucas Made to Star Wars over the years.
- Good Name For A Rock Band:
- A Running Gag in Wiki Weekend videos. For example, while reading the Marvel wiki on Silver Surfer, Karl comments that all of the Surfer's nicknames, power names, and associates sound like the names of rock bands.
- "Far-away Lucas" and "Far-away Nisha" (the names given to the respective people when calling from home) also sound like rockband names, something Karl noticed when reading comments on one of their videos.
- Humiliation Conga: When talking about how Blockbuster failed, Karl points out that Blockbuster made some serious errors in judgement, such as letting people download movies on their phones (back when phones weren't smartphones and has really, really low quality screens), They attempted to remove late fee's, but ended up losing investors (and had to reinstate them a few years later), and also charged a "stocking fee" alongside charging people for the DVD if they kept it for a few days longer than normal. The response? To better clarify the stocking fee and "if you keep it, you pay in full" rules, which didn't help. And finally, the inevitable rise of Netflix and a company with a CEO that didn't want to change with the times made the company run itself into the ground, and thus became a punching bag for the world to use.
- Improv: The subject of The Janitor On Scrubs Made Up His Own Lines, which has Karl explain that Neil Flynn, the titular Janitor from Scrubs essentially improvised all his lines. This makes his characters Cloud Cuckoo Lander nature when talking to his colleagues make significantly more sense.
- Intimidating Revenue Service: The topic of Even The Joker Won't Mess With The IRS, and explaining the origins of the most famous example; Joker in Batman: The Animated Series being scared of the IRS.
- The Juggernaut: Discussed in Even The Juggernaut Can't Stop The Juggernaut Wiki Weekends video, that has Karl and Lucas runs down the powerset of the Juggernaut, and what make him so hard to stop.
- Kayfabe: Invoked by Karl when he dropped his Nintendo 3DS onto the ground, and pointed out to the audience that he dropped it in a specific way the first time as to not damage it, but the second drop wasn't planned at all. They replayed the moment in slow motion later in the video.
- Loophole Abuse: As noted here, the editors; Luke, Brad, and Nisha, all have to find images that are royalty free for the video, or that would reasonably fall under fair use. Part of the issue is that some images need to be paid for, and while Karl doesn't take issue with this particular problem in most cases, he takes issue when a video had to be scrapped because Getty Images hosts pretty much all of the World War II archive images his editors could find, and thus couldn't make a video on that topic. They cost several hundreds of pounds to use each, when he argues that they should be public domain for historical purposes. Brad at one point also had to draw Robert Johnson to bypass the crew not being able to use any actual images of him due to copyright concerns.
- Never Heard That One Before:
- Karl bears a great resemblance to Bo Burnham, and many commenters on Fact Fiend videos remind him of this. Karl has mentioned this several times as a behaviour of particularly bad comments.
- Karl's last name, Smallwood, sounds like, well slang for a small penis. He gets why it's funny to point out, but it got old real fast seeing this in comment sections.
- Non-Indicative Name: Karl mentions on this TikTok Q&A that the name of the company Fact Fiend is signed up to for the studio; "Big Wangers Inc." got some justifiably confused looks by the council who, until Karl clarified what videos he made, thought it was going to be used as a porn studio.
- No Flow in CGI: Discussed in Violet's Hair was Almost Impossible to Animate, which has Karl point out the animators didn't even know if the technology existed to make her hair behave realistically. The solution Pixar came up with was to have different hairstyles for different situations.
- Off the Rails: There's a good chance any given episode has at least one or two tangents within it.
- Refuge in Audacity: Karl has a penchant for swearing on camera, with Brad asking him, for one episode, to not swear "for the fans." The video topic? The Austrian Town People Keep Having Sex in Front of...yeah.
- Retool: Whenever Youtube gives any video of theirs a ContentID Claim, Karl and co. go out of their way to de-list the offending video and re-edit said video with unrelated clips that they know are safe, or cite other facts that are otherwise unrelated to the actual video topic, in order to intentionally to screw over the claimants.
- Self-Deprecation: A fair amount of it. For example, in this video on Nintendo's ability to make unbreakable products, Karl points out that they make them for the general audience of klutz's, which he includes himself in (and later demonstrates, much to his annoyance).
- Solve the Soup Cans: Back in 2018, the set got redesigned to have a full green screen, instead of a pop-up one with rounded edges. However, Karl hated the new green screen so much he asked Brad, one of his editors, to put a mock-up of the old green screen as the new green screen image, until the old one could be bought back.
- Special Effects Failure: A Running Gag of sorts is Karl wearing something that'll interfere with the greenscreen behind him. This has the effect of turning anything green invisible, including his Tattoo on his right arm, which is partially filled in green.
- Spell My Name With An S: Karl occasionally complains that people frequently misspell his name.
- Standard Snippet: The music used in the background and on the end screen is "Two Finger Johnny" by, who else, Kevin Macleod.
- Stylistic Suck: The entire show is built around having a more lackadaisical appearance compared to other fact shows, from the cheap greenscreen lazily taped to a wall with the corners showing on camera, to Karl wearing casual clothes and often holding a mug or bottle while presenting, to his looking at and talking to his editor instead of focusing on the camera, and of course going off-topic frequently. Karl deliberately maintains these aspects of the show; when Brad bought a better greenscreen, he refused to put it up. The show still gets constant negative comments by people insisting they're doing it "wrong", yet the channel has consistently grown in popularity. Plenty of fans will identify the "pub chat" feel as a selling point. Exaggerated during the 2021 English quarantine, where the green screen is missing due to not being in the studio, and a sign saying "green screen" was added until Karl tapes green fabric to his wall.
- Take That!:
- Towards the History Channel in one video, as the topic was outright admonishing it in favor of talking about Horrible Histories, a show that Karl demonstrates to be significantly more accurate (the entire run only ever had 12 mistakes) to history.
- Karl despises Cyberpunk 2077, in large part due to the bugs, mass crunch periods, and controversy surrounding the game. They also point out that to those who claim it was never designed for the Xbox One and Playstation 4 in mind, that it has been in active development since 2013; the year those consoles came out (and you can't exactly do game development on hardware that literally does not exist yet!). To those who dislike the bugs, but think it's a good game regardless, Karl shuts this notion down in the comments by saying that "this sandwich actually tastes fine if you eat around the neatly coiled turd in the middle of it" (The games' story and gameplay does not make up for the one massive problem; the games' bugginess, the game has).
