Originally from Mansfield, Nottinghamshire, Scott graduated from the University of York with a degree in linguistics. While at university, in 2004, Scott produced a website parodying the British government's "Preparing for Emergencies" website, including a section explaining what to do in case of a zombie apocalypse. This resulted in the Cabinet Office demanding the site be taken down; Scott sent a "polite response declining to take down the site"; as of August 2020, the site is still live. In 2008, Scott became the UK organiser of International Talk Like a Pirate Day, and was subsequently nominated by his friends to run for presidency of the University of York Students' Union as "Mad Cap'n Tom Scott". Despite running as a joke, he won the election and served as the organisation's 48th president. That same year, Scott and three friends formed the comedy troupe, The Technical Difficulties, with whom he hosted an eponymous radio show on University Radio York. The show later won the Kevin Greening award at the Student Radio Awards. After graduating, Scott made several appearances on British television shows both as a contestant and presenter. He captained the Hitchhikers in series 3 of BBC Four's Only Connect in 2010 but was knocked out by the Strategists in the semi-finals, and, in 2012, was a presenter in the Sky 1 series Gadget Geeks alongside Colin Furze and Creative Technologist Charles Yarnold, where he was responsible for the creation of software solutions. In 2010, Scott and the Technical Difficulties troupe began the "Reverse Trivia Podcast" series on the Technical Difficulties website wherein Scott would read the answer to a 1984 trivia question card while his fellow panellists attempted to guess the question. The show concluded in 2014 after the commencement of Citation Needed. Scott received widespread coverage in 2013 for "Actual Facebook Graph Searches", a Tumblr site which exposed potentially embarrassing or dangerous collation of public Facebook data using Facebook's Graph Search, such as showing men in Tehran who have said that they were "interested in men" or "single women who live nearby and are interested in men and like getting drunk".
YouTube
Scott registered his main YouTube channel, Tom Scott, on 17 May 2006. As of 26 July 2020, the total view count of its public videos is nearly 627 million. Scott produces and uploads educational videos to the channel across a range of topics including history, science and technology. Also hosted on the channel was a filmed version of Citation Needed with The Technical Difficulties over eight seasons, from March 2014 to November 2018. He additionally produced explanations of computer security issues on Brady Haran's YouTube channel, Computerphile. He is known for wearing red T-shirts, originally worn out of a need for continuity during filming. At the end of 2015, Scott launched a collaborative YouTube channel with his colleague and friend, Matt Gray, called Matt & Tom. The channel hosted The Park Bench wherein the pair would sit on a park bench and discuss videos, their travels, and other anecdotes. The series was produced weekly from its inception until 24 March 2018, when they announced that the series would no longer be produced on a regular schedule due to time constraints. In late 2018, the channel became a vehicle for videos of The Technical Difficulties, including "The Experiments", where the troupe piloted a number of game show ideas. As of 12 June 2019, it is airing their new series Two Of These People Are Lying, in which Scott has to guess which of the troupe is giving accurate information pertaining to a Wikipedia article whose title he has drawn from a prepared stack. On 9 April 2020, Scott published a video of which the view counter recursively updates in the title of the video using a script programmed by him. In that video, he speaks about entropy, automation, Internet history and Yahoo Pipes.
Other projects
In 2014, Scott co-founded Emojli along with Matt Gray. It was a parody emoji-only social network based on social networking applicationYo, and was described by Salon as "an inside joke turned into reality". It closed in July 2015 after it became too expensive to maintain. Scott followed this up in September 2015 by creating a full-size emoji keyboard out of fourteen standard keyboards to type every standard Unicode emoji. Other web apps Scott has created include "Evil", "Tweleted", "What's Osama bin Watchin?", "Parliament WikiEdits", and "Klouchebag".
In 2010, after losing a bet that the New Orleans Saints would lose Super Bowl XLIV, Scott ran for Parliament in the Cities of London and Westminster constituency as the joke candidate "Mad Cap'n Tom". Coincidentally, Scott stood against the Pirate Party candidate Jack Nunn, which was described on the BBC News Quiz as "a split in the pirate vote". As part of his bid, he promised to scrap taxes on rum, have schools offer courses in "swordsmanship and gunnery", hand out free rolls of duct tape to "fix broken Britain", and put a 50% tax on downloads of Cheryl Cole MP3s due to his dislike of the singer. He described his chances of winning in the safe Conservative seat of Westminster as "Somewhere 'twixt a snowball's chance in hell an' zero." He received 84 votes, including the vote of Noel Gallagher, the lead guitarist of Oasis.
