CBEEBIES: Hey Duggee!

“Isn’t it time for….  Duggee!!!”

Most other parents I’ve spoken to about Cbeebies programmes will agree on at least one thing - Hey Duggee is great.

It follows the adventures of a Scouts-like club called the Squirrels, made up of various animals - Octopus, Crocodile, Rhino and so on - who earn their badges for doing different activities.  Their scoutmaster is an enormous dog called Duggee.  Or he is a normal sized dog and they’re all tiny…  It doesn’t matter - as we saw with Bing in the last Cbeebies post animal realism has no place in children's’ television.

Which sounds very plain and quite dull, and it isn’t either of those things.  For a start, the badges the Squirrels earn don’t dictate the adventures they have - it’s not a case of ‘they need to earn their climbing badge, they climb somewhere, get the badge, the end.’  Rather they have an imaginative adventure and a badge relating to what they have been doing is just presented at the end by Duggee with an enthusiastic ‘Woof!’ (By the way, Duggee doesn’t speak English, unlike the other animals, but communicates surprisingly well with a large range of expressive woofs.)

This gives it room to be a playful relaxed show rather than having each episode be a quest for something or have an objective to achieve (the opposite Cbeebies example would be the Go Jetters, who have to find a way to defeat Grandmaster Glitch each episode - but that’s a different post).  The Squirrels don’t even always have ‘adventures’ as such; sometimes things just happen in a dream logic sort of way.  As it should always be in children’s telly everything is bracketed in a friendly, non-threatening bubble without being bland or uninnovative.

This nice atmosphere and bright friendly colours makes it a very relaxing show to watch.  The shapes and animation style are minimalist and uncluttered, making it easy on the eye and easier to go haywire on doing different plots.  It has a fearsomely catchy banjo theme tune.  It also has a whimsical sense of humour which is emphasised by the narration - Alexander Armstrong is the celebrity voice for Hey Duggee and he is very good at doing the friendly upper-class patrician voice (think Stephen Fry’s voice for General Melchett in Blackadder IV with less psychosis).  The humour of the plots can be seen in the clip below, where we find out how far the Squirrels have had to travel on their treasure hunt...

The badges the Squirrels earn are always very specific to the plot that has happened, almost suspiciously so.  It wouldn’t surprise me that when Duggee rushes off to get the badges to hand out at the end of each episode, he’s actually running off to make them all as well.  For instance did a Dancing Bug badge really exist prior to the episode where Duggee had a bug dancing on him?

Also, did Duggee create the Squirrels Club, or is he just one of many club leaders?  And do the parents know about him giving the Squirrels a ‘Duggee hug’ at the end of each session?  If Duggee wasn’t a dog but a human that bit of the show would be a little bit dodgy…  

Forgetting the facetious niggles, Hey Duggee is probably the only Cbeebies programme I can binge watch if necessary.  And could probably binge watch on my own time as well as my son’s.  One of my favourite episodes is the Sandcastle Badge one - where the episode morphs from the Squirrels building a sandcastle into an episode of Location, Location, Location, with a deluxe castle being designed for a not terribly macho crab and his long-suffering friend Nigel. At the end of the episode, after the Squirrels have gone, the crab sees the tide coming in and says “Let’s enjoy it Nigel… While it lasts.”  Which is pretty much how I feel about each episode in the morning, before the maelstrom of life kicks off again.

TV: BoJack Horseman Season 4 (with lots of spoilers...)

"No, you don’t deserve to die young, only the greats die young. Oh, now you think you’re young all of a sudden!" - BoJack Horseman's conscience

BoJack Horseman is not your usual adult-oriented animation series.  Usually with this genre - The Simpsons, Family Guy, South Park, Rick and Morty - the emphasis is on comedy.  And seeing BoJack Horseman for the first time (especially if you start with the first series), it seems on the surface to be very similar (although it has the best opening credits out of any of them...).

The premise certainly seems to superficially setting the viewer up for lols galore - in a world populated with regular people and animal people, a washed star of an awful but successful sitcom from the 90s gets drunk a lot and behaves badly.  About halfway through Season 1 though, it became clear that this was a cover story for being all that and an examination of depression in the deeply shallow world of Hollywoo.  The animal/people bit seems to to be a gimmick but after a few episodes it seems natural for a biped mansize dog with sunglasses to be marrying a normal human woman.

BoJack Horseman is a complex character, a nice way of saying he is a complete mess.  In Season 4 - on Netflix since last Friday - he claims he is poison, that everyone he gets close to he destroys, and there’s plenty of evidence to support his case.  Season 3 ended with his young co-star from the 90s dying after going on a massive drugs binge with him, and BoJack nearly committing suicide.  But right from the first season the show has introduced elements that give context to his self-destructive nature: his love-deprived background, his feelings that he has wasted his talents on something superficial and worthless, his borderline alcohol and drug addictions - and plenty more.

The theme of Season 4 is parenthood.  It’s an attempt to do more of a deep dive on why BoJack is who he is, how his current character was formed.  A young horse girl, Hollyhock, turns up on his doorstep to find out if he’s her real father.  At the same time, he finds out that his hated mother has dementia and he grudgingly takes her in - for a while.  With flashbacks we find out his grandparents’ and parents’ backstories, and the ghosts of the past (such as BoJack’s lobotomized grandmother) haunt the ghosts of the present (represented by his depression and his mother’s dementia).  Continuing the parenting theme, there’s the plot where Princess Carolyn is trying for a baby and miscarries, resulting in the break up with her boyfriend.

All of this would make the show remorselessly bleak which is why there are the more traditionally comedic subplots - Mr Peanutbutter running for Governor and Todd’s Clown/Dentist business are the ones that stand out, although if the Governor race is meant to satirize Trump it’s pretty toothless.  The fact that most of the comedy is in the subplots is enough indication of the road the series has chosen to go down by now, and it feels less and less essential to me as the drama intensifies, but maybe I just like the darker stuff…  For me that’s where the humour lies.  My favourite ‘joke’ of the season comes at 1:45 of the below clip, and is a lot funnier and truthful than the ‘idiot becomes politician’ jokes.

The middle-ground between jolly and fucking depressing is probably the sweet plot of Todd realising he is asexual and coming to terms with that. It's not a subject I know anything about and I think it is the first time I've ever seen it being dealt with anywhere, ever. So kudos for that in itself. The comic relief idiot character (Father Dougal in Father Ted is probably the best example) is usually an asexual. But the character actually becoming self-aware and seeking a support group to understand it? That never happens.

It’s quite ambitious to try to tackle all these themes and plots in one series though and although it does a very good job on it, there’s definitely some creaky structuring - after one episode covering BoJack’s guilt over Sara Lynn’s death, it’s pretty much forgotten about and the series moves on from it too quickly considering it’s essentially the cliffhanger resolution to the last Season (although in its defence that episode covers a year of BoJack’s life).  And I really don’t understand why Princess Carolyn and Ralph split up - it seemed very rushed and the plot just peters out, begging to be resolved properly.  And the whole campaign trail for Mr Peanutbutter just faded to nothing as well.  It did sometimes seem like the writers put so much into Bojack’s story they ran out of things to do with the others by the final 2 or 3 episodes.

Generally it’s a success though.  A real highlight is the episode ‘Time’s Arrow’, dealing with the story of BoJack’s parents getting together.  It’s viewed through the filter of his mother’s dementia, technically making it an unreliable narrative, but it’s pretty convincing and manages to make us feel sorry for Bea while at the same time not hating BoJack for his treatment of her.

And the big surprise of the series is that it actually ends in a really nice way - BoJack realises has some family he actually likes and has feelings for.  If the concept of the show is that things have to get worse for him before they get better, could Season 5 actually be where things start going right for BoJack?  Guess we won’t find out until next year...

BoJack Horseman Season 4 is out on Netflix now