When a children’s television show reaches a certain level of cultural saturation, the characters are destined to enter the crazy world of the music industry. It happens like clockwork. Think of the Teletubbies hitting the top of the UK singles chart with the 1997 banger Teletubbies Say Eh-Oh!, or Bob the Builder achieving the same feat twice, in 2000, with Can We Fix It?, and a year later with what might count as the definitive version of Lou Bega’s Mambo No 5.
However, it’s hard not to detect the stench of corporate cynicism whenever this happens. You always sense that programme makers know they have a trapped market and that music represents yet another way to extract money from parents. But there is one exception – and that is Hey Duggee, the CBeebies animated series about a lovable dog who runs a club for preschool kids. Not only is Hey Duggee the greatest British children’s TV show of the past 20 years, but it has also worked up an organic relationship to music.
Take The Stick Song – an instant classic, it appeared in the season two episode The Stick Badge in 2017 and quickly went viral. It was watched millions of times on YouTube. It was played on Newsnight. There have been sport-related spin-offs (“Kicky kicky kick kick”) and heavy metal covers by bands such as Slay Duggee. When The Stick Song is played at the Hey Duggee live theatre show, it is routinely greeted in the same way the Beatles would be if they were to suddenly materialise and burst into She Loves You.
It makes sense, then, that when the time came to branch out musically, Hey Duggee would find a collaborator with an element of authenticity. What I’m trying to say is that Hey Duggee is releasing a DJ mix with Hot Chip.
Hey Duggee: Summer Fun Mix is a 30-minute set, released on YouTube today, in which Hot Chip’s Felix Martin stands in his back garden and blends hits like Getting Ready, Duggee On The Dancefloor, The Feelings Song and The Welcome Song (designed to make Ukrainian refugee families feel welcome) into one big rave. A long mix like this is guaranteed to go down well with kids – and parents.
Although you can’t help feeling that Hey Duggee might have bribed Martin into participating (one episode features a band called Hot Cheep), it is mystifying that more shows don’t try to bridge the divide between kids and parents like this. As someone who has spent too much time in the kids’ Spotify trenches, I know that most music released by kids’ shows is abjectly horrible.
The Tweenies, for instance, released five singles in their timeand each was torture to endure. Their debut, Number One (highest chart placement: No 5), was like being subjected to a mass cat drowning. By the time they chose to bow out with a cover of Blair’s 1995 minor hit Have Fun, Go Mad, it felt as if the Tweenies were an entity designed by a hostile foreign government to break the national spirit.
Similarly, although he is wonderful as Mr Tumble, Justin Fletcher has released multiple albums, all of which make you long for death. Just Party, from 2015, has 19 songs on it. One is a cover of Starman by David Bowie. I want you to imagine what that sounds like, because I would never be able to live with myself if I found it online and posted it here so you had to listen.
The trick is to find the few kids’ TV show songs that don’t make you hate the concept of music, then rotate them. Rastamouse’s album Makin’ a Bad Ting Good is passable, while Bluey’s composer, Joff Bush, has done a great job of taking the show’s broad palate of music and putting it into albums that you can listen to in the car without wanting to veer into the central reservation. Hey Duggee: Summer Fun Mix belongs in this category – and that is the highest praise I am capable of giving it.
God, these summer holidays are long.
