Hey Duggee: how a cult CBeebies show became the surprise TV smash of lockdown

It wrestles with some of life’s biggest philosophical questions, from the nature of existence to the meaning of art. It is littered with pop-cultural references: Apocalypse Now, Donkey Kong and the Cure to name just three. And it touches on diversity and disability with a lightness of touch rarely seen on TV. On YouTube, its clips have racked up more than 2.8bn minutes of viewing time.

So why hasn’t everyone heard of Hey Duggee? Probably because not everyone has a toddler and a TV that is permanently set to CBeebies.

Hey Duggee has long been a cult favourite not just for kids but for their mums and dads, too. However, since lockdown, its unique ability to bridge the divide has only become more valuable. The brightly coloured animation is creative, inclusive, joyous and ever so gently educational – and the ratings reflect that. It has been the most-watched kids’ show on iPlayer during lockdown (67m requests), and reached 1.4 million people as the top-ranking CBeebies show for April, May and June this year. The show has won six Baftas and two international Emmy awards.

For those who have no idea what Hey Duggee is, let me explain. Each seven-minute episode involves a bunch of animal children (a crocodile, octopus, hippo etc, all confusingly referred to as “squirrels”) spending time with Duggee, a kind of canine scout leader who heads up Squirrel Club. Duggee endeavours to award them a badge at the end of each show, once they’ve been shown the ropes of a particular subject: “Well done, squirrels! You’ve earned your tree badge!” What makes it significantly better than it sounds on paper is the amount of love poured into it – from the acid-house-inspired music and smart visual gags to the hilarious regional accents of characters such as Chew Chew the Panda (whose sarf-east tones have been compared to those of Adele).

“It’s deeply anarchic,” says Alexander Armstrong, who narrates the show. “When the squirrels step out of the clubhouse, anything might happen – they might go on some psychedelic trip up the river to the heart of darkness or they might skip dreamily through waving corn.”

Indeed, there is no set formula for an episode. The Omelette Badge features a Rollerblading ostrich getting lazy chickens back into egg-laying shape; The Theatre Badge opens with an argument between Tino, the artistic mouse, and a chipmunk called Eugene about whether art should challenge or merely entertain; while The Mixtape Badge features nods to Ornette Coleman, Björk and Orbital (who tweeted: “Finally made it to CBeebies!”). When Boris Johnson called the 2019 general election, Hey Duggee’s The Election Badge was rushed forward to help kids understand the basics of democracy. When my daughter refused to brush her teeth for a year, playing the song from The Toothbrushing Badge – which features a halitosis-stricken lion called Alain L’Odeur – was the only way I could get her to sit still.

Studio AKA’s Grant Orchard is the creator of Hey Duggee, and says his two energetic boys were key to the show’s framework: “I was always looking for things to do with them, and so I thought it would be great to have a show that would inform people about how to entertain rambunctious kids.”

Orchard, who had worked predominantly in advertising, sketched out his initial idea for the show in 2012: back then it was called Chop Chop and Duggee was Bertie Bowwow, although the gist was the same. Armstrong was brought in at an early stage to narrate, with the idea that his rich tones could create something similar to Lionel Jeffries’ character in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. “There’s a whiff of Brian Johnston, the great cricket commentator, in there, too,” says Armstrong. “And there’s also an inflection of my grandmother there. When she was talking affectionately to her grandchildren, she had a way of making her voice purr slightly; it was so warm and loving you could wrap it around you like a blanket. I really liked the idea of this patrician, faintly military-sounding character having that huge capacity for warmth and affection.”

Armstrong fell in love with the voice he’d landed on, so much so that when there was a bit of pushback regarding whether or not it was the right fit for CBeebies, he said: fine, but they would have to recast it. “They were lovely, and said: ‘OK, let’s run with it.’”

Making Hey Duggee is a highly collaborative experience, says the show’s script editor and writer Jenny Landreth, even if it is ultimately Orchard’s vision. She thinks there’s a misunderstanding about who the show is written for. “People have said to me: ‘It’s clearly a show written for adults that kids also enjoy,’ which is not the case. Our aim is to entertain our young audience. We’re not on some secret mission; nothing is: ‘Wink, wink, this one’s for the grownups.’”

A lot of Hey Duggee’s magic is down to budget concerns. The simple geometric shapes that make up the characters (the frogs are just triangles with eyes) make animation far swifter. And a lot of the music comes from trawling through sound libraries. (“Halfway through the first series, we realised that we had access to the entire BBC back catalogue, so we really went for it,” Orchard says.) Everyone who works on the show seems extraordinarily committed. Orchard says that some voice actors emerge sweating from the booth after putting their all into voicing the astonishing array of secondary characters in the show.

Sometimes, those characters carry a message: Rochelle in The Making Friends Badge uses a wheelchair, and Mr and Mr Crab are married, although there are no gay rights badges or disability badges. Instead, inclusivity is left as a natural aspect of the show. “It would be disingenuous to say that we didn’t think about inclusivity, but we didn’t want to be preachy with it,” says Orchard. One of the questions he is most commonly asked is: why, when all the mums and dads arrive with their children at the start of each episode, the crocodile Happy has an elephant for a parent. “Most people get that he’s adopted, but I’m pleased we are posing that question, even if we don’t explicitly answer it on the show,” he says.

Orchard admits he’s been surprised by the show’s success since its launch in 2014, even if his team have been so busy that he’s never had a chance to properly take stock. But he says it was a buzz to see Duggee get its own show at the Design Museum – a cartoon dog standing proudly among the Anglepoise lamps and Eames lounge chairs. And he was thrilled when his mum – a voracious reader – mentioned that a fictional character in one of her books had shoved her kids in front of Hey Duggee. “It’s getting to be part of the cultural lexicon that I really like. I always hoped that a kid would grow up and remember watching it with their parents.”

Nothing could have prepared him for the success of the Stick Song in 2018, though. The gloriously catchy rave tune (“Stick stick stick stick sticky sticky stick stick!”) was played on 6 Music and was at one point the subject of a campaign to help it reach Christmas No 1. Evan Davis even used it to play out Newsnight, declaring: “Even if you weren’t in a gravel pit with a big speaker in 1989, we think you’ll like this.”

“I was worried that song would be our Bob the Builder moment,” laughs Orchard. “That it would send people over the edge, and they’d be like: ‘I can’t take that programme any more.’ Luckily, I think we swerved that.”

Indeed, affection for the song was such that a bunch of metallers even formed a band around it – recording a blistering cover version and naming themselves Slay Duggee as a result. “You don’t treat kids like babies,” says the drummer Black Shuck. “They don’t want to hear Nirvana played on a toy piano. They want to hear Hey Duggee played on a Dean Dimebag spiky guitar with double kick-drum and somebody screaming into a microphone.”

Such is the crossover love for Hey Duggee that the BBC used a Hey Duggee Stay at Home Badge video as part of its lockdown awareness campaign; a Handwashing Badge video swiftly followed, and garnered 97,000 views in the first 24 hours. Parents grappling with home schooling could turn to Science With Duggee on YouTube, which has now had 12.4m views.

“I think in the middle of all this fear, obfuscation, lack of trust and mixed to poor messaging, Hey Duggee is uncomplicated and feelgood,” says Landreth. “It’s kind-hearted – and kindness has felt essential, in life generally, but now especially.”

“I just think it’s a masterpiece, and I’m over the moon that I get to be in it,” says Armstrong, before adding with customary flourish: “Well done, squirrels! You’ve earned your excellent children’s entertainment bay-adge!”

Hey Duggee is on BBC iPlayer. The Hey Duggee Adventure Bus is available to preorder from Smyths Toys.