The Spiffing Brit



"As you know, this is "The Spiffing Brit", a channel where we drink tea, praise the Queen, and do absolutely nothing political."

- "How to break The USA Election So The Queen Wins - Democracy 4 Is Perfectly Balanced with exploits"

The Spiffing Brit is a YouTuber who specializes in finding exploits and Good Bad Bugs in games (and occasionally other systems, including YouTube itself) which can be used to gain outrageous advantages in play. While he is skilled at identifying combinations of features which produce unexpected advantageous effects, he also welcomes and showcases exploits discovered by others. His videos tend to focus on demonstrating the results of using these exploits, mostly in real-time strategy games and usually humorously, but with simple (or iconic) enough exploits he will take the time to demonstrate on-screen how to invoke or activate them.

He does all this in the persona of a Quintessential British Gentleman, embracing every possible British stereotype from a Spot of Tea and worship of Queen Elizabeth to rampant colonialism.

The Spiffing Brit joined the Yogscast in 2019.

His YouTube channel can be found here.


 * Acceptable Targets: Todd Howard of Bethesda Games is the frequent target of Spiff's mockery, usually disguised as effusive praise for a bug-free and perfectly balanced game.  Spiff has also appropriated Howard's infamous line "It just works" for highlighting particularly broken combinations of features or misfeatures.
 * Aside Glance: He uses several stock images that function as this since he never appears on-camera.
 * Author Avatar: A top-hatted, monocle-wearing Quintessential British Gentleman with a Badass Mustache, usually holding a cup of tea.  Sometimes seen in armor, sometimes in a suit, and sometimes as a stick figure based on a classic "rage face" meme.
 * Blatant Lies: Any video title taking the form " Is A Perfectly Balanced Game With No Exploits".
 * Catch Phrases:
 * "Just sit right back, make sure you have a warm cup of tea in hand, and watch as we ."
 * "It just works."
 * "It really is that easy."
 * "...Spicy..."
 * "...Majestic..."
 * "...you lovely sausages..."
 * "It's perfectly balanced."
 * "Beans."
 * "Wa-bam!"
 * "With the power of Yorkshire Gold!"
 * Designated Evil: Coffee drinkers.
 * Drink Order: Yorkshire Tea.  And only Yorkshire Tea.
 * Fan Nickname: "The Time-lapse Guy", for earlier video content in which he provided commentary on grand strategy games run in time-lapse.
 * Fake Upper-Class Brit: Although his online persona is supposed to be an upper-class British gentleman, his use of Received Pronunciation is spotty at best, with elements of what seems to be an Estuary accent slipping through here and there.
 * Game Breaker: Explaining and demonstrating these are his stock in trade.
 * Gentleman Snarker
 * High-Class Glass: His avatar.  The page image could practically be his avatar.
 * Knight Fever: Spiff has bought several noble titles from the Principality of Sealand, usually as a strange incentive for viewers to add "likes" to his videos.  And as part of an early 2021 video he has acquired several square feet of land in Scotland, which by Scottish law and custom makes him a lord.
 * Nice Hat: His avatar's topper.
 * Philosopher's Stone: Not in a literal sense, but a figurative.  One of Spiff's favorite kinds of exploit is the "infinite money cheat", where an unusual set of player set-up decisions at game start and/or an unexpected chain of actions during play results in far more money than the developers ever expected anyone to make.  Spiff is also noted for discovering such exploits involving real money during ill-conceived promotions on sites like Microsoft, Steam, Twitch and Amazon.com.
 * Playful Hacker: Essentially takes this role for video games and YouTube itself.  He usually doesn't alter code itself, but rather uncovers and employs unexpected behaviors or implications in the user interface.
 * And as befits a Playful Hacker, he reveals the exploits he finds in websites like YouTube for the express purpose of motivating them to fix them.
 * Product Placement: Thoroughly averted, although not by choice. Spiff would really love it if Yorkshire Tea chose to sponsor him.
 * Quintessential British Gentleman: Spiff's online persona.
 * Reaction Shot: Most of his stock images take the place of reaction shots.
 * Red Eyes, Take Warning: Several of his avatar images, as well as a few of his other stock images, have alternate versions with blazing red laser eyes to indicate that he's getting dangerous.
 * Rouge Angles of Satin: Spiff demonstrates a verbal variety, frequently misreading or mispronouncing words one would expect to be common or well-known.
 * Running Gag: "Reanu Keeves", Keanu Reeves' "beautiful cousin", a grotesque figure Spiff recreates in every game where he has the option of controlling the player character's appearance.  Occasionally he uses a different name, such as "Seymour Clevarge".
 * Sarcasm Mode: His online persona's default personality.
 * Spot of Tea: Practically every Spiffing Brit video extols the virtues of tea -- particularly Yorkshire brand tea -- while demonizing coffee drinkers.
 * Stock Footage: Spiff's videos are filled with a set of stock images, many if not most of which have a "SpiffCo" watermark applied to them.  The regular viewer will come to associate many of these with certain catchphrases and behaviors.
 * In early 2021, some generous soul with the initials "RF" redid a number of the stock photos as artworks depicting the Spiffing Brit's avatar as their central figure.
 * Suspiciously Specific Denial/Our Lawyers Advised This Trope: Spiff's "disclaimers" presented immediately before he demonstrates how to exploit poor programming decisions on a website
 * The Teaser: Most of his videos open with a short five- to ten-second clip of a (usually) key moment from later in the video.  It's usually an Action Prologue of some sort.
 * Unusual Euphemism: "Beans!" Uttered whenever he makes a mistake or something unexpected happens.