Surprise! How I got turned into Bluey’s Bandit, the world’s greatest dad

For most people, the latest episode of Bluey – entitled Surprise – came as exactly that. Deliberately unannounced, it dropped like a Beyoncé album, ambushing viewers who were still coming to terms with the recent gut-wrenching, 28-minute masterpiece The Sign.

However, I have spent the past three years waiting for Surprise. This is because my name appears in the credits. “Created and written by Joe Brumm, from an idea by Stuart Heritage,” it says. I am as weirded out about this as anyone else – but let me explain how I came to play the smallest possible role in my favourite television programme.

Like a lot of parents, I discovered Bluey on Disney+ during lockdown. Although its premise was unassuming to the point of blandness – a cartoon about a family of dogs – I put it on for my kids and quickly became smitten. Each episode was a perfectly realised short film. Some played out in real time. Others ended with breathtaking time-jumps into the future. One managed to depict the entire arc of human evolution, from the swamps to a distant intergalactic future, in the space of seven minutes. It was incredible. I needed to know who wrote it, so I put in a request to interview Brumm, Bluey’s creator.

In June 2021, the interview finally happened. Brumm is extremely likable in person and given to airing his uncertainties freely. When we spoke, he was writing season three and told me that generating ideas was becoming more and more difficult. His children had been the same age as Bluey and her sister, Bingo, when the show began, so he could draw on their experiences for inspiration much more easily. But now they were growing up. “A four- and a six-year-old are so different to an eight-year-old,” he told me. “It’s harder for me to see through their eyes.” But my kids were almost the same ages as Bluey and Bingo.

The next month, I took them camping by myself. I have written about the camping trip before – how it was intended as a sticking plaster to get us through an especially rough time – but I didn’t mention that I spent a big portion of it cracking up in a playground.

In the playground, each of my kids wanted to play a different game. They got into an argument over which to play first: Floor Is Lava, or some sort of complicated robot defence game that required the use of a climbing frame as a fort. Exhausted, I stupidly told them that they could both play whatever they wanted, with me, at the same time.

Parents will understand that following the logic of any child’s game can be difficult. But following the games of two kids, simultaneously, while overwhelmingly sleep-deprived, is impossible. I spent what felt like eternity trying to protect a climbing frame from an invisible robot attack, only for the other kid to scream”: “NO, Daddy, you’re standing in LAVA!” So I would hop up on a seesaw and the other would yell: “NO, Daddy, now you’re LETTING THE ROBOTS IN!”

This went on and on, back and forth, disappointing everyone, until I lost it, shut myself in a toilet cubicle and sent Brumm a 60-word email explaining my situation. He replied quickly, saying that he liked the idea and wanted to pursue it as an episode. “You have everything you need to survive in that toilet,” he added, kindly.

That was almost three years ago. Since then, information has come in fits and starts. I heard that the idea was going to be incorporated into a larger story, but nothing more. Nor was I allowed to see any preview footage. This was down to the episode’s placement in the series. Brumm had always envisioned The Sign as the finale, but, in Surprise, Bandit makes a joke about selling the house. Since that would have spoiled The Sign, the decision was made to tack it on to the end of the season. And since The Sign was the biggest moment in the history of Bluey, I had to wait for the episode like the rest of the world.

Now, the wait is over. Surprise is an episode of Bluey about a dad desperately attempting to keep up with the logic of his kids’ games at once. The episode’s official description is: “Bluey and Bingo want Dad to play two different games, so Dad tries to play both at the same time.” My experience has now become the experience of Bandit Heeler, the world’s greatest dad.

My participation in the world of Bluey started and ended with that one brief email. My children have now grown older than Bluey and Bingo. Their interests have shifted; their energy has changed. The best thing about any of this is that Brumm has created a time machine for me, taking a snapshot of a very specific moment in the life of my family that would otherwise have been lost and crystallising it for ever. What an honour.