Inside the Big Issue: Hacker T Dog and the chaotic rebirth of kids' TV

“I’m a mess, cocker. You don’t want to see this.” Hacker T Dog is having a bad hair day when Big Issue arrives on a video call with Blue Peter presenter and his soon-to-be co-host, Abby Cook. So it’s strictly sound only for children’s television’s iconic canine. But Hacker makes his presence felt. As he always does.

Hacker is set to join Cook and her co-stars Joel Mawhinney and Shini Muthukrishnan as a regular Blue Peter presenter this month. Dogs are nothing new for the show, of course. From Petra to Henry via Shep, Goldie and the rest, pets have been central on Blue Peter. They serve as sidekicks to the human presenters, seen but rarely heard beyond the occasional unscripted bark. Hacker is different.

He is joining team Blue Peter as an equal, the first ‘animal’ presenter in its 67-year history. “I’ve been on a lot of episodes of Blue Peter since 2009,” says Hacker, whose human assistant Phil Fletcher prefers to stay under the radar/table. “But never as presenter. So I’ve got more Blue Peter badges than I’ve had hot dinners. Then again, I never eat hot dinners.”

He’s the latest in a long line of TV puppets, from Basil Brush to Roland Rat, who have been recruited to attract viewers to children’s TV. Crucially, he also has form at going viral. Even if you haven’t watched children’s TV in decades, you will likely have still seen Hacker T Dog. The clip of him with co-presenter Lauren Layfield, laughing, snorting, unscripted, talking about “normal men, innocent men” while filling time between shows on CBBC is 18 seconds of comedy gold. So can he bring new life to Blue Peter?

Read more in this week’s magazine.

What else is in this week’s Big Issue?

On the front line of Britain’s clogged-up asylum courts

Protests at asylum hotels led to one council turning to the law to get a hotel shut down. More across the country are following suit. But one thing is largely ignored: for asylum seekers to move out from hotels, their cases must be processed and their appeals resolved. Home secretary Yvette Cooper has even promised fast-track appeals. But what happens in these appeals courts and can they be sped up? Our reporter went to the drab heart of the asylum tribunals to find out

Is that a spurtle in your bowl… or are you just mixing your oats?

Constantine Costi is the director of The Golden Spurtle, a stirring film about the fiercely competitive porridge-making world championships in the Scottish Highlands. The ingredients required are oats, water, a pinch of salt and a bowlful of curious characters.

Getting to grips with the UK’s fertility crisis

Fertility rates are falling faster in the UK than in any other G7 nation and have declined by 25% since 2010. The national birth rate fell to an all-time low of 1.44 in 2023, which will make it increasingly difficult to sup- port our ageing population in the decades ahead.

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