The Colour of Wisdom is Bluey

With my son having reached an age where television is a viable (even occasionally necessary) form of entertainment, I’ve become acquainted with the global phenomenon that is Bluey.

For the uninitiated, Bluey is an animated television show based in Australia in which all characters are different breeds of dog. It centres around a family of Blue Heelers - an Australian breed sometimes known as a Cattle Dog. In each episode the “Heeler” family – Mum (Chili), Dad (Bandit) and two sisters Bingo (four) and Bluey (six) – as well as some of their friends offer you their perspectives on all sorts of situations that arise in family life.

It would be an understatement to say that the show has elevated the genre of children’s television. You only have to look at it to know that it is a cut above others for children of a similar age. It makes Cocomelon and most of what’s on offer on CBeebies look like (ahem) child’s play. With six to seven minutes of unique score per episode, stunning illustrations and colouring, hilarious writing and a helpful, wholesome moral to each story, it might be a mistake to call it a show for children.

For parents, especially those who are so for the first time, it can feel as though there are barely any guidelines, let alone answers, on how to be a good parent. Whilst Bluey (the show, not the six-year-old) comments on this lack of answers on a number of occasions it is, somewhat ironically, the only thing that comes close to a guide.

In fact, I have found some of the stories and lessons of Bluey to be so profound, touching on surprisingly adult concepts and so exquisitely told that it can feel a bit like you have a life-coach and therapist for the price of a Disney+ subscription. I wanted to highlight some of my favourites to convince you to give Bluey a try as an adult (although probably when you have kids around) and pay attention to what’s being shown. It certainly isn’t the mindless opiate drivel that is “the rest” of children’s TV. Given there are three series so far, I’ll give you some of my favourite episode from each season.

S1 E38 - “Copycat”

In this episode, Bluey is copying everything her dad does until they find an injured budgie at the side of the road which they take to a vet. It’s clear to an adult watching (and the adults in the show) that this is really only going to have one outcome but of course it comes as a surprise to Bluey. I watched this way before my boy was capable of imaginative play and what surprised me about this episode is that when Bluey and Bandit get home, Bluey wants to “play” the situation that unfolded throughout the day. She asks Bingo to be her injured budgie and takes her to Mum (the vet) and tells her that she wants to play that the budgie has died. I suppose this episode made it clear to me that play is a kind of simulation, and can be used as a coping or learning mechanism for when a child is in a difficult emotional spot.

S2 E20 - “Ticklecrabs”

Ticklecrabs is a game whereby some people are “ticklecrabs” and their goal is to chase you and tickle you, whilst only walking sideways and using your arms like crab claws to tickle. This is now a staple activity in my house when it comes to getting my boy to a particular place (into the bath, perhaps, or to brush his teeth) without fuss. The reason I loved this episode in particular is that at the beginning of the episode, when Bandit and Chili learn that Bluey and Bingo want to play Ticklecrabs, Chili scarpers sharpish leaving Bandit to be the one in eyeshot. For a time, Bandit resents Chili’s disappearance because playing these kinds of games with kids is absolutely exhausting. As he’s trying to escape the ticklecrabs, though, he bumps into Chili hiding somewhere and learns that she’s got some things she’s going through that perhaps he’s not aware of, and that he just needs to learn to deal with this kind of Dad situation on his own. She eventually joins the game and rescues him (he just needs “30 minutes on the couch”) but it was a neatly-articulated perspective on balancing your needs and those of your family’s.

S2 E26 - “Sleepytime”

Probably one of the most visually and musically beautiful Bluey episodes. The music is based on Holst’s “The Planets”, for reasons that will become obvious. Sleepytime is about what happens at night in the Heeler household. It begins with Bingo and Chili reading a story about the solar system before bed. Bingo says to her mum that she wants to do a “big girl sleep” and wake up in her own bed, though we suspect that won’t happen. Bingo nods off and we join her in a dream, where she hatches from an egg that looks like Earth and flies around the solar system with her cuddly bunny. Outside of the dream, there’s lots of sleepwalking which lead to Bingo being in different places in the solar system in her dream. At one point, she loses her soft toy and her covers, and it shows her crying on a cold, lonely moon in her dream. If you’ve experienced the heartbreak of seeing a child cry in their sleep, this scene won’t fail to upset. This leads to the last crescendo of the show (Holst is delivering by this point) where Chili wakes up to the sound of Bingo’s crying and goes to her to tuck her in and find her soft toy. In Bingo’s dream, this is represented as the frozen moon becoming a comet, racing towards the Sun and basking in its warmth. The Sun then says to Bingo (with Chili’s voice of course) that she will always love you, before Bingo climbs back into her Earth shell and the episode ends.

I suppose the reason I loved this one is the same reason I love dreams. You don’t know what dreams other people are having and, especially when it comes to children, you want to believe that were that situation to happen to you, you might be influencing their dreams in a positive way.

S2 E50 - “Baby Race”

Made my wife and my mate’s wife cry on first watch. This one beautifully articulates the pressure that goes with “keeping up” when it comes to your baby’s development. The lesson in it being, of course, that you’ve got to run your own race and do things in your own time. I’ve often thought that this is one of the risks that goes with joining things like NCT groups - it creates the situation in which development anxiety can creep in.

S3 E31 - “Onesies”

The whole of season three is immaculate but I think Onesies is one of the most debated as to its true meaning. The story revolves around Chili’s sister visiting, something that hasn’t happened for four years. (Why four years, you ask? Exactly.) Chili’s sister, Brandy, brings Bluey and Bingo each a onesie - something that immediately seems dangerous because Bingo has a habit of almost “becoming” her onesie. In this case Bingo is given a cheetah onesie, so spends most of the episode chasing the others around.

As the episode progresses, it suggests that part of the reason that Brandy hasn’t visited is because she finds seeing her sister with children upsetting. My read on it is that it’s trying to communicate that Brandy either can’t have children or has been having serious difficulty conceiving, something that Chili backs up when she’s explaining to Bluey that Brandy “wants something more than anything but it’s not working out”, all while on screen it’s showing Brandy playing happily with Bingo in the garden. It’s a real tear-jerker moment. The “lesson”, if you can call it that, comes from Bandit - “you’ve got be one with your onesie”.

S3 E33 - “Granny Mobile”

One of my favourite side-shows in Bluey is her cousin, Muffin. Up to this point across all the series, Muffin’s reputation has been established as a classic spoiled brat who throws her toys out of the pram as soon as she doesn’t get her own way. In this episode, that all changes.

The Heelers have a neighbour, Doreen, who is having a yard sale to finance a holiday. Bluey, Bingo and Muffin are playing “Grannies”, where Bluey is a kind granny, Bingo a can’t-hear-anything granny and Muffin is a grouchy granny. They decide to play a game with Doreen’s mobility scooter which is on sale. Doreen’s agreeable nature sees her continually fleeced by passers by who offer her next-to-nothing for what she’s selling. Even the mobility scooter is priced at 300 bucks, where Bandit thinks it’s worth at least three times that.

At some point, a real “grouchy granny” shows up, complaining that the yard sale is blocking the footpath. The old lady says she’ll pay 100 bucks for the mobility scooter “take it or leave it” which Doreen accepts. Unfortunately for the lady, Muffin is still sitting on the mobility scooter and proceeds to haggle the old lady up to paying a whopping 1200 bucks (and eighteen lollipops) for the scooter.

Obviously the scene is rather contrived but there’s a deep psychological lesson in there for agreeable people, who often struggle to assert their own boundaries. A strategy for people like that is to “make yourself disagreeable” (for example with a boss when negotiating a raise) in order to get what it is that you actually want. The other perspective that I enjoyed is that perhaps Muffin is just a really disagreeable person. That’s not to say that she’s unpleasant (although at times I would argue she is) but rather that her disagreeable personality is valuable and is going to suit certain roles in life better than others. Nursing, for example, not so much. Banker on the trading floor? Maybe.

S3 E34 - “Space”

This episode is the neatest description of psychotherapy that I’ve come across. One of Bluey’s friends seems to be a bit depressed but can’t figure out why. They’re playing astronauts and he keeps running off. Eventually him and his friends go down a black hole where he sees a vision of his past in which he felt abandoned. His teacher shows him that, in fact, he just got lost in the slide and his mum was there the whole time. The line that sticks with me is “you know what’s here now, you don’t need to keep coming back here”. For someone who’s gone through a lot of therapy, I needed to hear that line. I couldn’t help but feel after watching this that a show for kids aged 6-8 has no business being this powerful.

S3 E49 - “The Sign”

Finally, the blockbuster. This was a special 28-minute episode (that’s 4 times as long as normal) about moving house. The marketing that went into this was impeccable. They’d created a fake listing on Australia’s equivalent of Rightmove for the Heelers’ house weeks before the episode aired. I can’t describe this episode as I wouldn’t want to spoil it for anyone. All I’ll say is that it was immaculate start-to-finish and I wept buckets at the end. Go watch it.