A few months ago, I came across Bluey on the BBC iPlayer, decided it was one of the best TV programmes I’d ever seen, resolved to blog and tell ‘the world’ about it, and then discovered it had been out for several years, had a huge following and won many awards, and even been named in top 100 sitcoms of all time by Rolling Stone.
So I’m late, but not wrong at least. And since I’d already mentally committed myself to writing a blog post (like all the other gushing tributes by adults on the internet!) here I go.
Bluey is a cartoon for small children. Bluey is six and Bingo, her sister, is four, and most of the episodes involve them and their parents in the house, playing elaborate games or going to some other sector of the kiddy galaxy – the park, the shops, the swimming pool. They are dogs, by the way. Dogs in Australia.
Why is it so good? Because it’s exciting. It’s sometimes surreal. It’s also grittily down-to-earth. And very funny. Oh, and sentimental, devastatingly sentimental. All at the same time. Just like the early years of family life.
‘Games’ doesn’t really do justice to the suspensions of reality in which the family immerse themselves, and which give many episodes their plot. How these flights of fancy are created for us, the viewers, is beyond clever. In one episode called ‘Mount Mumandad’, climbing over Mum and Dad, who are collapsed in end-of-day exhaustion, becomes a mountain adventure for the kids, complete with falls, tents, and storms.
While the play sometimes stretches relatability, the details don’t. All the little incidental scenarios, interactions, and thought processes are achingly recognisable. In ‘Ice Cream’, Bluey and Bingo pester Dad to buy them ice cream because their cousin has been allowed one. Dad gives in, then says he doesn’t want one himself, then, in the seconds it takes for the card machine to work, decides amid panic and self-loathing that he has to have one too. I’d say scenes like this are as unflinching and truthful as the bloodiest of award-winning war movies.
Bluey also nails the vernacular that’s shared between adults when they are around kids – the eye rolls and passive aggression, suppressed annoyance at how other parents do things, smiles of solidarity with strangers. Brace yourself for a few hotly romantic moments between Mum and Dad. That’s right. Hot romance between talking dogs in a kids’ cartoon.
There are always big laughs. Bluey understands how parenthood is non-stop comedic juxtaposition: a fully-grown adult and a small new human trying to cope with each other is inherently funny. We see the daily, hourly, battle between parental logic and child logic – the child’s desire to execute tiny pointless projects and the parents’ desire to perform like a ‘good’ parent, or lie flat on the carpet. We see the humiliating lengths parents will go to appease their children. In the episode ‘Dance Mode’, Dad and Mum are repeatedly forced to dance in public by the rules of a game. Here, as so often in Bluey, adults and kids can laugh together at the different roles they play in the family.
And then the sentimentality. In real life, this comes from love and the passage of time. As kids grow, you’re always thinking back and thinking forward at the same time. Precious phases arrive and depart constantly, and the pain of it is that you often only see this in retrospect.
The episode ‘Granddad’ ends in a poignant embrace between Mum and her dad, as they watch Bluey and Bingo swim in a river where Mum once played, watched over by her father. ‘Barky Boats’ gently deals with puberty, and the anxiety of children when they are about to leave behind the innocence which is all they’ve ever known. In ‘Baby Race’, Mum tearfully remembers her struggles with Bluey as a baby.
You’ll definitely need to wear dark glasses if you don’t want to be caught weeping into your jalfrezi during ‘Sleepytime’ which compares a mother’s love to the sun warming a planet, while an orchestra blasts ‘I Vow to Thee My Country’.
Perhaps the format of scores of six-minute episodes is the perfect way to convey the disjointed nature of family life; dramas, routines, and moods come and go. Each episode is cogent and multi-layered, like a poem, or song perhaps – the soundtrack is always central. Above all, Bluey reflects back to us how everyday moments become thrilling and transcendent, simply because of who is sharing them.
Maybe I’m just nostalgic, now my kids are older than Bluey and Bingo. But I’m intrigued at how the kids love it too, and maybe they are nostalgic for their old selves, are able understand their family a bit better, are seeing the future and past all at once.
Damn you, Bluey! Where are those dark glasses?
David Mitchell 