Move over Peppa Pig! Hey Duggee is the show that's capturing young (and old) hearts

Hey Duggee is my two-year-old son George’s programme of choice. In fact, there was a period of six months or so – once he decided that Peppa Pig was insufficiently recherché – when it was all the little fellow would watch.

Nor is he the only discerning toddler to have fallen for it. At 125 episodes (and counting), the series – which celebrates its fifth birthday next Tuesday – is one of the great triumphs of 21st-century children’s television.

Drawn in blissful simplicity (principally using the 2D design software Animated) but also with a kaleidoscopic wealth of imagination, this preschool series has won six Baftas and two International Emmys, and has so far been requested almost 140 million times on iPlayer and watched for more than 1 billion minutes on its official YouTube channel. It is also the subject of an exhibition that returns later this month to the Design Museum in west London. And as for the 11 new episodes that were added last month, George’s response was simple: “More!”

“We wanted to do something different with the show,” says its British creator Grant Orchard. “We knew that if we were going to get commissioned, it was going to be for at least 50 episodes, and we didn’t want to run out of ideas. So, we thought, let’s make this as energetic and silly as possible, and take the show wherever we can.”

Crucially, like Peppa Pig, Hey Duggee also has lots of jokes for the parents who find themselves having to watch children’s TV with their offspring.

Every episode is set in a children’s activity club called the Squirrel Club. There are five young “Squirrels” (in fact, animals ranging from rhino to mouse), and it is run by a dog called Duggee.

Unlike the very garrulous Squirrels, all he can say is varying shades of “Woof!”, and yet he’s as capable a scout-master-type as you could hope for. Driven by Alexander Armstrong’s unseen but all-seeing narrator, each episode centres on the youngsters gaining new expertise in a certain subject (anything from jam to space to spiders), and thereby getting the corresponding “badge” to prove it.

If this sounds like a slightly dry set-up, don’t be fooled. As Orchard – a longtime employee of the London-based animation house Studio AKA – suggests, what’s remarkable about the programme is the garden of delights this modest-sounding set-up has yielded, and how much fun it is for parents and progeny alike.

It’s not just the giddy momentum, the delightful animation, the excellent specially written incidental music (by the duo Tin Sounds), the beautiful brought-in music by everyone from Bach to Rossini, or even (for parents) the endless cinematic references to everything from Top Gun to Apocalypse Now – it’s also the wittily daft plots. In The Exercise Badge, for example, the chickens have stopped laying eggs. Why? Because they’re obsessed with slobbing out in front of a dismal Casualty-type soap – inexplicably, in Italian – in which a nurse keeps swooning over a hunky doctor called Antonio. Step forward Hennie, the 100-foot-tall, aerobics-obsessed ostrich, to yank the chickens out of their indolence and get them a-laying once more.

Meanwhile, The Tadpole Badge has a new crop of frogs start as spawn and end up leaving home (“Don’t they grow up fast …” laments a Squirrel as one newly formed frog plummily announces “I’m going on my gap yar!”), and The Stick Badge centres on a sentient stick who sings an operatically mindless euro-pop rave song and almost gets burnt to a crisp for its efforts.

When I ask Orchard what he sees as the secret of Hey Duggee’s success, the 47-year-old father of two boys replies: “I like to think it’s because of the attention to detail that we put into the show. From the writing to the design, it’s all, we hope, well considered, and ultimately balanced to cater for family viewing, rather than concentrating purely on preschool. Our primary aim is to entertain and” – he pulls a face and makes a pukey “blurghh” sound – “possibly educate young kids, but really it’s to entertain the whole family.

“We don’t go ‘let’s dumb down for the children’,” he continues. “Why not use words that they might not know? Because after this, they might know it.”

Orchard’s endearing antipathy towards the dread phenomenon of “edutainemnent” is also part of Hey Duggee’s charm. Topics that in the other, preachier hands could be “issues” to be addressed – one of the Squirrels, the cheerful crocodile Happy, is adopted; two crabs, John and Nigel, are gay – are presented entirely matter-of factly.

The little croc is dropped off and collected every day by two elephants; the crustaceans live together; that’s “it”.

“We never considered explaining any of those things,” says Orchard, who grew up chiefly in west London and studied animation at the Surrey Institute of Art and Design. “But also it’s a time-constraint. To get a narrative in seven minutes, you can’t afford large backstories about why or how people are the way they are or behave the way they do. Those things are irrelevant for the story we’re trying to tell for the kids. So, these things aren’t included lightly, but at the same time we don’t make a big deal of them.”

John and the (mute, eye-rolling, hopelessly henpecked) Nigel are, in fact, just two of Hey Duggee’s superb gallery of incidental characters. These also include the sloaney Henny (inspired by Frances de la Tour’s Miss Jones in Rising Damp), the cockney, confectionery-loving panda Chew-Chew (both of them superbly voiced by Tittybangbang’s Lucy Montgomery) and supremely, Tino the Artistic Mouse. Brilliantly voiced (like John) by actor Adam Longworth, the latter is a permanently apoplectic “artiste” who was inspired (as Orchard tells me) by the late critic Brian Sewell.

Does this extraordinary richness and variety, I wonder, also stem from the programme’s being part of the streaming age? In other words, is there extra pressure to make every episode of Hey Duggee as different as possible from the last one, because there’s a good chance it might be watched straight afterwards?

“Yes,” says Orchard. “We have a very strict format – the kids get dropped off at ‘school’, they get collected, they get given their badges – but in between all that we need to make each episode as narratively and aesthetically distinct as possible. Because they can start blending into one another, and especially because of the way they’re consumed. It’s pretty voracious how people get through it.”

Before I leave Studio AKA’s tranquil Clerkenwell headquarters, I have to ask one final, crucial question: what sort of dog is Duggee?

“We originally thought he could have been a Tibetan mastiff,” Orchard replies, “but they cost about a million pounds each, and we couldn’t afford to get one to shoot it. So he ended up just as a big, brown dog.”

Hey Duggee is available on Apple iTunes, Google Play, Amazon Prime Video, Netflix and BBC iPlayer.

Designing Duggeee is at the Design Museum, London W8, from Dec 21-Jan 6. Details: 020 3862 5900; designmuseum.org