The creators of Don’t Hug Me I’m Scared offer us a glimpse behind the puppets

How best to summarise Don’t Hug Me I’m Scared to the uninitiated? “I suppose it’s like a kids’ show for adults,” says creator Joe Pelling. “It’s annoying to be so evasive on your first question, but we tend to try not to explain it too much,” the director adds. “We kind of want people to be watching it and thinking: ‘What is this? What the fuck is this?’,” says creator Baker Terry.

Confusion is essential to DHMIS’ s unique brand of colourful, chaotic and occasionally distressing content. Launching on YouTube in 2011 as a web short, after the creators had just finished art school, the show was born as a comment on “being taught creativity between occasionally narrow margins,” says Baker. Over a decade has passed since its first episode – which showed its central characters Duck, Red Guy and Yellow Guy receiving a lesson in creativity – and the series is now coming to Channel 4 as a full-length TV show (launching today on 23 September 2022). Produced by Blink Industries, the new release gives us more time with its characters and world, while inevitably throwing up more questions than it answers. Though mystery will always be at the heart of the show, we recently caught up with creators Joe and Baker, alongside producer Hugo Donkin, to catch a glimpse into its making.

Most significant, however, is that viewers going into the show should not expect to be met with a mammoth expansion on a beloved classic. “The goal was to keep the show small,” says Baker. “To not try to expand outwards and create this gigantic South Park-style cast of recurring characters and to keep everything as insular and tiny as possible. To the point where we did that successfully and quite far into scripting, we realised they literally didn’t get up from the table until the second-to-last page.” This stripped-back approach also arose because of how “unfeasibly difficult” it is to get puppets to pick up and use props frequently during a shoot. “We realised we were going to have to actually write jokes that functioned as jokes without a prop in every single instance,” Baker explains.

Rather than expanding the selection of props or locations, DHMIS instead spends its new, longer run time looking closely at its three protagonists, trying to understand who they are, their house, why they live together and their purpose. “That’s the show,” says Joe.

Will this level of dissection live on when the show moves from the online space that has housed it for so long? While fandom does live best online – “the internet is innately something that you can kind of sit and examine,” according to Joe – over a decade on, it’s hard to imagine commitment to DHMIS will ever wane, no matter the format in which it’s delivered. Finishing our conversation on the run-up to the launch of a long-awaited Channel 4 series, we ask the trio where they’d like to see DHMIS go next, in an ideal world. “A live musical has always been a kind of thing that we fantasised about, but we haven’t acted upon,” says Baker. “But,” in true DHMIS fashion, “they don’t sing,” Baker suggests. “All you can hear is the puppeteers’ feet squeaking on the floor.” Hugo predicts: “It’s gonna be a hit.”