For British people of a certain generation (mine), it may be the Australian accents that soothe us into a state of pure happiness. It may be the quality of the animation, or the gentle, low-stress storylines. Or it may be that it just caught us at a particularly vulnerable time.
Whatever it is, whenever my children ask what we should watch on TV, I lobby hard to veto Nailed It!, (cake reality show), shouty cartoon Teen Titans, or tween sitcom, Bunk’d, in favour of one of my top viewing pleasures of the moment. My kids lightly protest; at eight, they have almost outgrown Bluey, the Aussie cartoon about a blue dog and her little sister. But I, apparently, have not.
The story of Bluey and its runaway success – since launching in 2018 it has gone on to broadcast in 60 territories – is reminiscent of the early days of Peppa Pig, another animated show aimed at nursery-age children that became one of the few things that parents could tolerate. Both position themselves in opposition to louder, flashier rivals. Both circumscribe the action, signalling to parents that they are in the hands of a Well-Made Show with no need for superheroes or space travel. Bluey is so acutely well observed, within such a tight domestic landscape, it might as well be Mrs Dalloway.
For the kids, it is an early exposure to the deep pleasures of seeing aspects of their interior life externally represented. In Bluey, the mum is always engaging with her children while doing a million other things. The dad, less stretched, effortlessly falls in with his children’s make-believe worlds, while trying to persuade them that his crafty nap or sidelong glance at the cricket (“how is that lbw?!”) is part of the game.
The show takes the alternative reality of small children extremely seriously. When Bluey and her friends, Snickers (a sausage dog) and Coco (a poodle), establish a rule that you can only walk in the shade, they are stuck in the middle of a field until the sun clouds over. Coco wants to cheat and make a run for it, but not even the promise of cupcakes will break Bluey. “If you cheat,” she says, “there’s no point playing the game.” There’s no hardliner like a six-year-old hardliner.
For parents, there are other, extra-mural pleasures. Bluey is made by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation in collaboration with the BBC (public funding! Of course). Its popularity has attracted famous cameos. Lin-Manuel Miranda popped up as the voice of a horse in one episode, Rose Byrne as Bluey’s aunt in another. There are things the kids see that the parents don’t, too. To my children’s scorn and amazement, it took me most of the first season to properly fix in my head that Bluey and Bingo, her younger sibling, are girls. “Is Bluey a boy or a girl?” I would ask, dimly, at the start of every episode. “How do you know she’s a girl?” The characters are square and blue and are supposed to be Australian cattle dogs, also known as blue heelers, with no anthropomorphic gender cues whatsoever. My child looked at me with pity: “We know she’s a girl because they call her ‘she’, der.”
In the end, the pleasures of the show seem to turn on a simple question of wanting to spend time with Bluey and her family because they’re so nice. They’re so funny. Everyone’s so happy. If the dramas are recognisable – that flash of fury from a child when somebody cheats at a game, or falls out of role, or gets tired, or hungry – everything is resolved by bedtime, with just enough of a nod to the long suffering of the parents to ensure they’re not presented as martyrs. But crucially – a nice escape from the real world – with no shouting. The language of the show is silly and divine, meanwhile, hingeing on all the jokes that grow within families. We’ve picked some of them up. In my own house, it amuses us to refer to dollars, as Bluey does, as “dollary-does”.
This morning, before writing this, I asked my daughter why she likes Bluey. She mentioned the characters and the stories, before evoking one of the primary pleasures of being eight and feeling wildly superior to the six-year-olds. Mainly she liked Bluey, she said loftily, “because dramatic things for babies are funny”.
Emma Brockes is a Guardian columnist
