Also known as Billy1987-1994, BillyH or just Billy, Billy Hicks (born 24th September 1988) discovered knightmare.clara.net at the age of 11, by following a link on the Watched It site near the end of June 2000. When most online fans were in their late teens or early 20s, Billy was surprisingly young, still in primary school and being the first major online fan not to be born when Knightmare started in 1987 (he was born between transmissions of Series 2 episodes 3 and 4). He remained the youngest regular until Aranel joined in 2003, who is a year and two months younger than him.

Having forgotten about the show for 6 years, memories instantly flooded back as soon as he saw the front page. This Web Archive link shows how it would have looked at the time. He quickly signed the Bring Back Knightmare petition and Guestbook, and his first post in the Knightmare Forum was a rant on how children's television had gone downhill since Knightmare ended. He then found the first of the NKTP forums in July, before he found NKTP itself.

For the rest of 2000 he was without the internet, but returned the following year and made an 'I'm back!' post on the Knightmare Forum. He made his first official appearance in #knightmare chat on the 1st April 2001, after making a quick test visit the previous Wednesday. This saw the appearance of the 'Billy1987-1994' nickname, which he first used in an incarnation of the NKTP forum the previous year, and it was his regular chat name until it was shortened to simply 'Billy' in February 2008. His role in chat has grown over the years, being promoted to half-op status in mid 2003, op status on the 16th April 2005, becoming joint owner along with Darren on the 6th September 2005, and Founder status on the 19th May 2006. Shortly after this Darren lost regular internet access, making him the sole owner of the room, a position he found slightly daunting and in February 2008 he was back to the less daunting role of op status.

He remained active throughout 2001, posting in both the Knightmare and NKTP forums (including from Spain) as well as contributing to Knightmare.com for the first time. He also started buying series of KM on VHS from Adam Battersby, starting with Series 7 - he was surprised to find that he had memories of this series, from when he was just 5, as he assumed they'd all be of Series 8. On the 16th September he was part of Team 3 of RPG Season 3, the third series of the Knightmare RPG, along with Ali Everett and Jolly Jones. Like Teams 1 and 2, the team died in Level 1. The Caption Competition was also revived around this time, which he regularly participated in, and has since won five: 'Ugly old women' in 2001, 'Head Explody' in 2003, 'Behind Bars' in 2004, and 'Way of the Well' and 'Cold Feet' in 2005.

He wasn't that active in early 2002, but had fully returned by the end of the year. 2003 saw the introduction of his chat 'trademarks' of talking about the current week's number 1 and what he'd recently found at a bootsale, though he didn't post much on the forum at the time, making only 51 posts that year. In contrast, 2004, with interest in KMVR and the Challenge repeats at a high, was very busy indeed for him. This year he made over 200 posts, quite a few of which were in the 'Episode Discussion' forum. He also created the popular 'Picky Website Corrections' thread on the 4th April.
In chat, the White Hole craze was created by him on the 24th April. In July he fulfilled his ambition of writing a fanfic, when he wrote Knighty Knight Mare, a crossover between Knightmare and the show ChuckleVision.

In December 2004 he started a chat game of the show Who Wants to be a Millionaire, inspired by Mashibinbin's Blind Date. This continued in 2005 when he brought several more games to the room, notable ones being Odd One Out in May, Knightmare Catchphrase in September, and various Whose Line Is It Anyway games in November and December. December also saw him appear as one of the participants of the Wall Aid 11 project, and started a filk writing partnership with Darren and Mashibinbin.

In 2006 he discovered the real story of the 1987 Knightmare pilot when he bought the script from actor Richard Bonehill, subsequently posted his findings on Knightmare.com, and is currently in the process of scanning the pages for the site. In July he got himself a whole feature on Interactive Knightmare called Beg Billy (in the tradition of Ask Alex and Ask Andrew on NKTP), and a picture he made for one of the questions in the feature appeared as a Caption Competition on the same site. 2007 saw him back to singing, this time as part of Sing Back Knightmare's performance of All I Want Is Knightmare To View, a song he had co-written two years earlier.

Incredibly, he also has a life outside KM. Like several KM community members he aspires to be an actor, and indeed was one from September 2000 to June 2001, when he was at theatre school - his Internet Movie Database page is here. He made a minor TV appearance when he opened a box on Channel 4's Deal or No Deal in an episode broadcast in June 2007. He currently goes to drama classes at the City Lit adult educational college in London, and his ambition is to appear in Doctor Who, hint hint BBC.

(Originally posted sometime in late 2004)

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