Chairman of the board: starting the extreme ironing craze and how it become an epic meme

In 1997, a single moment changed my life forever when I decided to take my ironing outside and tell my housemate I was “extreme ironing”.

“Wait there,” he said when he spotted me in the garden , then disappeared to return with his camera. 

Then we got talking, “What if people really did their ironing outside in hazardous locations, like mountains or underground?”

As the pioneers of extreme ironing, we needed some more extreme names, so I took on the name ‘Steam’ and my housemate Paul became ‘Spray’. 

After that I told my mates about it all. They got it immediately. 

Even though I’d graduated from university in Leicester earlier that year, I was still involved in the mountaineering club. On weekends away, we took irons, boards and clothing with us to places like Snowdonia and the Peak District to try some real extreme ironing. 

For a couple of years, that’s as far as it went. 

Until new year’s eve, 1999, in Te Anau, New Zealand. 

I was there with my girlfriend - ‘Short Fuse’ - and talking to a pair of Germans, Kai and Ute. Somehow we got on to the topic of extreme ironing and they thought it was pretty funny. 

I didn’t really dwell on the encounter, until I got back to the UK a few months later and saw an email waiting from Kai. 

Dear Phil, I have seen your extreme ironing photos on the internet. I LOVE extreme ironing! I am going to form the German Extreme Ironing Section (GEIS) and we are going to be the best extreme ironers in the world. Love Kai

Game was on. 

I got the team back together, Matt (‘Starch’) and James (‘Basket’) and we created a more complete website, detailing how to do extreme ironing and showing a gallery of photos. 

Not to be outdone, the Germans created their own website. Kai became ‘Hot Crease’ and recruited a number of friends.

Interest in our efforts gathered pace. We started getting attention from newspapers and radio stations. Our site was Miles Mendoza’s ‘Website of the Day’ on Steve Wright’s Radio 2 show.

It was around this time I decided to adopt a fully new pseudonym, after a journalist from The Sun was very short with me when he found out I worked in PR. 

PR account executive Phil Szomszor transformed into IT consultant Phil ‘Steam’ Shaw. I figured nobody would ask you any questions if you said you worked in IT. 

Meanwhile, the Germans were very quiet. Something was up.

Another email arrived from Kai, telling me he was making a film about extreme ironing and he would like to come to the UK to interview me.

Given Kai was studying his geology PHD and had hardly any money, I was surprised he was this committed. 

This was foreshadowing of what was to come. 

After the interview, Starch, Short Fuse and I went to Munich to watch the film 'Have Fun, Look Tidy', which was being aired as part of a film festival. 

The cinema was packed out and we ate crepes we’d cooked on irons before the showing. 

Starch and I wondered what we could do to compete with the GEIS. 

We settled on running competitions and ramping up the efforts on the website, introducing a forum, shop and content management system.

Our first photo competition saw entries from around the world, including this phenomenal effort ironing in the French Alps from Father P.

We also saw interest in other forms of the sport, such as combining ironing with scuba diving and base jumping. 

One unexpected spinoff of the usually mountain-based form of extreme ironing was underwater ironing, pioneered by Germany's Iron Lung. He created a sub-culture within extreme ironing, where increasing numbers of scuba divers iron at the same time (current record 173, set in 2011).

Media attention grew further and I found myself doing regular interviews and appearances, the highlight being an appearance on the BBC panel show They Think It’s All Over.  

The GEIS returned the salvo with an appearance on Channel 4’s Eurotrash. They remained fully clothed. 

But Kai had even bigger plans. He wanted to host the first Extreme Ironing World Championships and asked for my blessing. 

I couldn’t believe his audacity, but said I would do whatever I could to help.

The World Championships was scheduled for September 2002. 

We had six months to get a GB team together and start training for the competition. 

I got sponsorship from iron manufacturer Rowenta, who said they’d pay for our flights and kit us up in return for having their logo on our kits. 

They got the deal of a lifetime. 

Our squad fully formed, we were ready to compete with the best extreme ironists from around the world. 

Extrem Bügeln Weltmeisterschaft 

We entered three GB teams for the inaugural Extreme Ironing World Championships, with most of the competitors loosely affiliated with the De Montfort University Mountaineering Club. 

A total of ten nations took part, but it was the highly-professional German team, competing on home soil, and the outlandish Austrian team who would be our main competition. 

The format of the event was simple, yet ingenious. Complete a half-mile course and iron different items of clothing in five environments: forest, water, rocky, urban and freestyle. 

Points were awarded for ‘extreme style’, ‘speed’ and ‘quality of ironing’. 

As the founder of the sport, I felt the pressure, but tried to put it out of my mind as I took to the course. 

As well as worrying about my performance, I had a gaggle of photographers and videographers following me around, including a film crew for a Channel 4 documentary. 

They were determined to put a wrinkle in my performance in a quest to create a great ‘telly moment’. If you watch the documentary on YouTube, you’ll see my usually calm facade break.

At the finish, I was unsure how well we’d done, as it was hard to compare yourself with other competitors. Word was going around that the Germans had cleaned up. 

Over the following hours, the results were calculated and we gathered in the giant marquee to find out who’d won. 

The individual honours went to Inga ‘Hot Pant’s Kosak. She credited her win to the quality of her ironing, which many competitors seemed to ignore. 

When it came to the team award, the results were announced in German and I was convinced my team - GB1 - had come third. In fact, we’d won! The golden trophy was ours. 

I couldn’t quite take it in. The result didn’t actually matter, I was just still coming to terms with the idea of my throwaway joke turning into a real bona fide sport - one that the British were champions (for once). 

Since then, there hasn’t been an Olympics or global sporting event where extreme ironing hasn’t been discussed. If you can have curling in the Winter Olympics, why not extreme ironing? 

Pressing for Glory

After the World Championships in 2002, the German Extreme Ironing Section effectively disbanded. 

It was clear that organising such a big event had taken its toll on its director Kai and he friends, who’d all given their time and superhuman energy to put it on. 

It was down to us to continue the mission to spread the word of extreme ironing around the world. 

The Channel 4 documentary Pressing for Glory was aired that December and we saw ever more newspaper, TV and radio coverage. 

In Leicester, the birthplace of extreme ironing, I did a parody of the David Blaine stunt, ironing in a glass box suspended from a crane in the city centre. 

I wrote a book Extreme Ironing in 2003, which became a best-selling Christmas stocking filler. I also got a PR lesson of my own, by messing up a BBC breakfast interview with Natasha Kaplinsky and Dermot Murnaghan, by forgetting to plug my book. 

Shortly after, I got an email from Rowenta’s US operation who’d heard of the European sponsorship of Team GB. 

They invited me out to Boston to discuss opportunities. 

As a twenty-something career coaster, I jumped at the opportunity. 

“What would you like to do next?” the CEO Paul Pofcher asked me. 

I told him it was always the dream of English people to ‘crack America’ and I could think of no better way of doing that than an extreme ironing tour of the US. 

“Leave it with me,” he said. 

Mr Americana

In 2004, the Rowenta team and their brilliant PR agency, led by Jennifer Gear, devised a tour of the US, taking in various landmarks on the way. 

I had a few requests. 

First, that Starch and Short Fuse could join me to spread the laundry load and share the fun. 

Second, that Dave Painter and Pam Harris (HUTC), who filmed an EI special for Transworld Sport, join as our film crew to document the adventure. I’d had my fingers burned by a few TV companies and Pam and Dave were the only ones I really trusted. 

Finally, I insisted that we replicate what we’d done at the World Champs and always iron hot, so they bought a miniature generator and extra-long extension cords. 

They readily agreed to everything we asked for. 

A photographer, Frank Rapp, was added to the tour, along with Rachel Greenstein from Jennifer’s PR team.

We were also showcasing the latest Rowenta irons and had lessons in improving our ironing technique. 

First up, we ironed in canoes and on a duck tour in Boston. This gave us a taster of the equipment and started to build up media interest in our tour. 

Not for the first time, we were compared to Monty Python. It’s like we weren’t being taken seriously as sportspeople!

We flew up to South Dakota and ironed in various locations in the region, including Mount Rushmore, where we did a satellite media tour, comprising 25 interviews in one morning. I don’t think my media performance was the best that day, and extreme ironing was becoming more and more like a job.

After ironing in various other spots, including Devils Tower, Custer State Park and Spearfish Canyon, we headed to New York for our finale. 

The plan was to iron in a cherry picker, but that couldn’t get through health and safety, so Starch ironed attached the back of an iconic yellow NYC taxi, before we made a brief appearance on Good Morning America. 

The tour was almost complete, before we did a bit of last-minute ironing in Times Square. 

Dave asked me what was next for extreme ironing. Just as he said that, I saw a Fox News segment of us displayed on the side of a building. Extreme ironing literally couldn’t get any bigger. 

“I don’t know Dave,” I replied. “It’s 2004, I’ve been doing this for a while now. I think it might be time to stop.”

Extreme Ironing comeback?

A few years passed and a lot of things changed in my life. I started buckling down at my job, moved to London, began a new relationship, eventually settling down and having kids. Extreme ironing was a distant history. 

I even forgot to renew the extremeironing dot com url, which got snapped up by a domain buyer and I never got it back (I’m still kicking myself). 

But it didn’t matter really, I was done with extreme ironing, right?

In 2011, I was with my mum in hospital. Her cancer returned and this time it wasn’t going away - she had weeks to live. 

Coincidently, there was an article about extreme ironing in a newspaper she was reading. Someone had been spotted doing it on the M1 motorway. Extreme ironing always made her smile, because it was always a kind of a homage to her. 

A month later she passed away in St Michael’s Hospice (you can read my write up on the Typecast blog) and I wanted to say thank you to the way they looked after her. Extreme ironing seemed like a fitting tribute. 

So, with my now wife ‘Mrs Steam’, I brought a bunch of the old gang back together, including Fe, Hyperglide, Flex and Hotwire, to extreme iron the Hastings Half marathon and raise money for St Michael’s hospice. 

We raised about £5,000 and it gave me a fitting way of saying a final farewell to my mum and trying a new form of the sport. 

Epilogue

As I write this, I am a couple of months away from my 50th birthday and have no plans to return to extreme ironing (but never say never, right!?) 

I often think back to an interview I did for a Sky documentary around 2004, just after I’d come back from the States. I was asked where extreme ironing would head next. 

My answer was that I would be quite happy if it ebbed away and became an urban legend, with people debating whether it really happened or not.

It didn’t really play out like that, because of the rise of social media and people’s continued discovery of it. I was flabbergasted when I saw how much extreme ironing there is on TikTok, for example.Extreme ironing gets reanimated and shared with a new generation every two or three years.

In a sense, extreme ironing was a social meme before social media was invented. 

I’m cool with that, happy to have my 15 minutes of fame and making a tiny contribution to pop culture. It was never about me really - in fact, I didn’t even put my real name to it, until today. 

Iron on!

Steam aka Phil Shaw aka Phil Szomszor

Fan Zone

If you can't get enough of extreme ironing folklore, check out some of these links and goodies.

• Extreme Ironing on Facebook - The nearest thing to an official regular-ish extreme ironing site from the Extreme Ironing Bureau

• Capito (Well Ironed) - The official song of the Extreme Ironing World Champions, written and recorded by Elnog (2002)

• Team GB at the World Championships - Video wrap-up of the inaugural extreme ironing showdown in Munich, from HUTC (2002)

• Pressing for Glory - The Channel 4 documentary, which included rivalry with a breakaway group combining extreme sports with other household chores

• EI in the New York Times - One of the many articles covering Steam, Starch and Short Fuse's US tour

• Underwater ironing - Video from HUTC showing ironing taken to new depths, including the world record set in 2011 for 173 people ironing under water at the same time. It's also in the Guinness Book of Records

• LADBible - One of the many discoveries and reanimations of extreme ironing on social media, this one clocking up 1.5 million views. It took us about 2 years to get that many views on our website 16 years earlier (2018)

• The Mad Austrian - A short film made about Heinz Wieser, a then 67-year old extreme ironist based in New Zealand. Directed by Hamish Johns & Finley Jones (2019)

• Funny and the Money - Podcast interview with Oli Hills and Luke Evans about the rise of extreme ironing on TikTok