“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.
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