It's got a fungus museum - and a new prison!

Continuing my trip down The Guardian's Top 50 TV Shows of 2022.  

#31 : Don't Hug Me I'm Scared

It was a gamble to take a deeply odd YouTube show and adapt its surreal parody of kids’ TV into a half-hour comedy, but Channel 4 made it pay off admirably. A stellar cast including Phil Wang, Lolly Adefope and Edinburgh Comedy award winner Sam Campbell brought uproarious pitch-black laughs to the Technicolor sets and puppets, with episodes just as likely to leave you humming along to catchy ditties about jobs as gawping at grisly skits about death. Like nothing else that aired on television this year – or maybe ever.

I've heard of this and I know it's got puppets in it, but that's about as far as it goes - so who knows what we're going to get?

And having watched it, I'm not entirely sure what it was that we got.  A "surreal parody of kids' TV" feels like as good a description as any, but it's not even the half of it. There are three main characters - a yellow Sesame Street-ish puppet (Yellow Guy), a character made of red string (Red Guy) and, errr, a duck (Duck) - and basically we just follow them on various misadventures.  And it's safe to say that strange things happen...

Episode 1 reminded me of The IT Crowd, but set in a fuzzy-felt workplace, where any of the workplace objects could suddenly come to life and start singing - or maybe get maimed in a horrible accident.  And if that makes little sense, in episode 2, one of the character's internal organs falls out and turn into a talking coffin, which explains that he's dead - so they all get ready for the funeral, which they unfortunately confuse with making a shepherd's pie.  Which is obviously followed by a surprisingly thoughtful rumination on death and grief.    And so it continues, all the way until episode 6, where Yellow Guy upgrades himself by changing his batteries and this enables him to go upstairs to the big boys' room, the bigger boys' room and (obviously) Lesley's room - all of which cause him to question the very nature of his existence.

And basically, without really telling you anything that's happened, I suspect I've given you a good enough idea of how things go across the season.  But, whilst I was staring at the screen open-mouthed, it did make me giggle quite a few times and there's also some quite nice "horror" elements to it - you kinda end up caring for these patently ridiculous characters.  It's also got a nice selection of inventive animation - many different styles are used across the season.  Yes, it's bonkers but there's been a load of love, thought and skill gone into making it so nicely bonkers.  Other things it reminded me of were Look Around You ("Medibot!") and Flight Of The Conchords ("Band meeting!"), both of which tickled me greatly and were obviously made by people having a good time.

Wikipedia tells me there's a whole other series on the web (which I'm quite tempted to watch) - and it has a great time trying to analyse the nonsense of it all.  The Wesleyan Argus (a US university student newspaper) describes it as "fine example of the era of esotericism", saying "there is a building meta-commentary on the relationships between viewer, perception, creator, participant, and art" - all of which sounds like something that Don't Hug Me I'm Scared would make up.  It's also amusing to read the cast list - there's some quite well known people in this, some of whom take the tiniest of roles.

One more thing before I go - in episode 5 Duck does a "visual inventory" of things in the house to check they're all there and look what's at the bottom of his list!

I really enjoyed this but it's definitely not for everyone - Mrs Reed would be totally "what's the point to this then?".  Which is a question I'd struggle to answer - I've no real idea why they made this, but I'm very glad they did.  At time of writing, it's available to watch on Channel 4 and if you like your telly to be somewhat left-field then I can thoroughly recommend it.

#30 - When it's good, it's very good
#33 - As beautiful as you'd expect