Don’t Hug Me I’m Scared (All 4/Channel 4) looks like Sesame Street and plays like David Lynch. It is the gently, gradually but relentlessly nightmarish vision of Becky Sloan and Joseph Pelling, who met as fine arts students at university and, when stuck in post-grad jobs they hated, teamed up with actor/writer Baker Terry and put their artistic skills to use creating a DIY web series that, between 2011 and 2016, became a crowdfunded hit. The six episodes – lasting a few minutes each – took the happy learning vibe of children’s television and twisted it into something so creepy you could feel it moving under your skin long after the cheery voices had faded into nothingness. A paean to creativity rapidly descends into an offal-stuffed nightmare. The monstrous nature of time stands revealed by a singing, dancing and eventually screaming clock. And so, horribly, brilliantly on.
Now DHMIS has moved to television. The episodes are longer but the characters – never given names, but known to fans as Red Guy, Yellow Guy and Duck (a man in a furry suit and string mop head, plus two puppets, respectively) – the lovingly detailed felt props, the claustrophobia, the growing threat of an existential crisis with every passing minute? They are all as delightfully, thoroughly, relentlessly present as ever. Like The Simpsons, it repays a rewatch with a finger poised above the pause button. I particularly enjoyed catching “Keep an eye on grease fires” written on the whiteboard as part of the trio’s domestic rota.
