CBeebies or barbarism!

An episode of “Hey Duggee”, a bbc children’s show, takes seven minutes to watch and about five months to make. Before Duggee—think Mary Poppins in dog form—can go to space or bake a cake or teach toddlers the rudiments of jazz, every woof and chuckle is painstakingly planned. Plots are devised, scripts written, storyboards sketched. A cast of children are shepherded in to record their dialogue. The music, which leaps from child-friendly symphonies to drum and bass, is layered on top. Last, designers spend seven weeks poring over every frame of that batch of episodes, like monks over an illuminated manuscript. Only then, after almost half a year, is “Hey Duggee” ready to be blasted before a toddler’s eyeballs.

The bbc has lost an audience and not yet found a role. Its charter, which lays out the justification for its continued existence, is up for renewal amid cratering viewing figures. “Hey Duggee” and its ilk provide the easiest answer. “Auntie” is now the world’s biggest commissioner of new kids’ stuff. Everything from “Hey Duggee” to “Bluey”, the life of a little blue dog, has been backed with bbc money. Rather than hammer this advantage, the bbc is, strangely, spending less. When CBeebies, its service for toddlers, was launched in 2002, the bbc spent 4% of its income on children. Now it manages barely 2%. When it comes to children, the bbc has never spent less yet mattered more.

Why can’t the market do it? For many years it did. Channel 5, a commercial channel, lovingly reared “Peppa Pig”, which was a commercial juggernaut. itv, a commercial broadcaster, once wrapped episodes of “Art Attack” around lucrative advertisements for lurid breakfast cereals. (When some middle-class parents balked at the adverts and banned their children from watching, it even served as a free lesson on the subtleties of the class system.)

A shift in regulation led to market failure. Sometimes it was rules being tightened. Limits on junk-food advertising made life harder for commercial broadcasters in the 2000s. Meanwhile obligations were loosened. Broadcasters were no longer required to provide original children’s content. Skip forward two decades and the bbc stands more or less alone among British broadcasters for new, top-notch children’s entertainment. It is the Beeb or bust.

YouTube was, briefly, a lucrative alternative for fine children’s content. After all, its audience is enormous. In total, bbc iPlayer delivers about 9bn streams a year. For comparison “Numberblocks”, a cartoon about maths shown on the bbc and YouTube, achieved similar figures on YouTube alone. But when new rules limited how much advertisers could track under-13s, revenue dropped by as much as 80%, according to Oli Hyatt, who co-founded the studio behind “Numberblocks”. YouTube by itself would not cover a fifth of his company’s costs. Even if YouTube provides the eyeballs, the bbc still pays the bills.

For the cheapest content, YouTube on its own still works. Anything more laborious (the credits for a single “Hey Duggee” episode run to 40-plus names) will struggle—particularly when big streamers are ditching fresh commissions. Between them giants such as Netflix and Disney+ commissioned 64 children’s shows in 2025, less than half as many as they managed in 2021, according to Ampere Analysis, which examines the entertainment industry. Why risk an expensive new show when reruns will sate the typical toddler? In 2025 the bbc alone commissioned 57 kids’ shows.

If the private sector will not bear the risk, the public sector has reason to step in. Studio aka, the maker of “Hey Duggee”, had no pedigree in children’s television when the bbc backed it in 2015. Risk can lead to reward. “Bluey”, an even more famous dog, was backed by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation and BBC Studios, the Beeb’s commercial arm. Now Disney+ pays handsomely to broadcast it and “Bluey” is the world’s most valuable pooch.

For an institution working out how to pay its way, commercial success is manna. BBC Studios, which flogs “Bluey” and “Hey Duggee” (and their merchandising rights) around the world, has revenues of £2.2bn a year. Britain is a services-export powerhouse. Sometimes it is a City lawyer in a suit; sometimes it is a dog in a scout uniform. They both show up in the gdp figures.

Cartoons can feel frivolous compared with the bbc’s lofty ideals. Why prioritise toddlers over, say, the World Service? If soft power exists, it comes in the form of “Hey Duggee” as much as a native-language news broadcast. The cartoon has been translated into dozens of languages and hit a billion views in China within a year. It was even dubbed into Persian for Iranian tots. Britain may be the “Little Satan”, but the devil has the best toons.

Platforms like YouTube now dwarf the bbc in terms of audience. For most children, “television” is the large screen through which they stream the site. The bbc has lost control of the medium but, for children’s content, it still has some say over the message. Since YouTube does not commission content, it can serve up gems only in the same way that an infinite number of monkeys can produce Shakespeare. Much of what it carries, however, is inevitably dross.

And so the bbc is meeting the audience where it is and putting more of its content on YouTube, giving “Hey Duggee” a happy second home. In the process, quality children’s programming almost becomes a public good: something freely available, yet difficult for the private market to provide. There is no such problem for prestige drama or Saturday-night entertainment. By contrast, a well-made cartoon or children’s documentary falls into the same bracket as a streetlight, an army or a park—societal infrastructure to be borne collectively. The bbc is sometimes criticised as a paternalist organisation. But paternalism is good for parents. If the bbc has a future, it looks a lot like a cartoon dog. ■