Review

Culture

Film & TV

9 August 2024

7 min read

Help for the Heelers

The benevolent butterfly effect in Bluey’s season finale.

From Mockingbird

Mockingbird connects the Christian faith with the realities of everyday life.

A cartoon dog family stand in their kitchen

Bluey and family.

Ludo Studio.

Written by Bryan J. This article first appeared in Mockingbird, 23 April 2024. By kind permission.

“Daddy, there’s no God in Bluey’s world, is there?” No joke, my precocious four-year-old PK [Pastor’s Kid] son asked me this question after watching the new Bluey season finale, titled “The Sign.” It’s a deep question, one that comes from a place of honest curiosity — “The Sign” is, without a doubt, one of the most spiritually significant episodes of a series that is known to offer big questions to little kids. The Heeler family is presented with a life-changing decision with no guarantee of a happy ending, and the whole of the episode features the family wrestling the unknown of the future. The fact that my son could pick up on the high stakes of the episode, the philosophical questions about the goodness of providence, and the impossibility of knowing whether the future was bright or not … let’s just say it justifies the tears that come every time I watch the episode with him.

Which is five times now. I have watched the finale five times and wept every time. Isn’t this show made for preschoolers?

“The Sign” reveals a family in transition. After offering a number of hints earlier in the season, we discover that the Heeler family dad, Bandit, has accepted a job offer that pays a lot more money, but will require him to move. Chili (aka Mum) agrees with the choice to move and take the new job, but she has sincere concerns about leaving family, friends, neighbors, city, and a beloved house behind. Bluey, of course, has trouble coming to terms with the idea, as any preschooler would, and Bingo remains blissfully ignorant of the big changes coming her way. The preparations to move coincide with preparations for Uncle Rad’s marriage to family friend (and Bluey’s godmother) Frisky, with the family’s four preschool girls joining in as flower girls.

Big changes bring big questions, of course. Nowhere is this more evident than in Bluey’s preschool classroom. Calypso, the teacher, models a zen-like spirituality for Bluey and her friends. At the end of story time, Bluey asks her teacher “Why do stories always have happy endings?” Her teacher responds, “Well, I guess ’cause life will give us enough sad ones.” (Is this a kid’s show?) This inspires a host of sad stories from Bluey’s peers: a guinea pig that ran away, a divorce, a lonely dad. It’s now that Bluey announces her not-so-happy ending, telling her friends that she is moving. To help the class cope with their sadness, Calypso reads her students a parable of a farmer, who approaches all of life’s good luck and bad luck moments with the simple attitude of “we’ll see.” It’s a story without a happy ending (or without any ending, really), and the kids don’t buy it. “Is that it?” asks one, disappointed. “What happens next?” asks another. “Everything will work out the way it’s supposed to, Bluey” says Calypso with kindness, which Bluey takes to mean that their family house won’t sell (which it does, in the next scene).

Big questions also mean big feelings. An enraged and fearful Frisky, dismayed to discover her fiancé expects her to move out west where he works, runs away the morning of the wedding. Chili hops in the car, with four preschoolers in tow, to track her down. A series of events, which can be only described as providential, take place along the way. Chili, Bluey, Bingo, and cousins run into just the right person, spill juice cups at just the right moment, and make pit stops at the precisely needed spot, to find Frisky in quiet reflection at a local hilltop park. Groom-to-be Rad shows up, too. Frisky and Rad talk through their concerns and move on with the wedding, announcing there that they’ve chosen not to move west as planned. It’s a lovely wedding, with dancing and family and fun and a host of easter eggs for eagle-eyed viewers to enjoy. “You’re having a happy ending!” announces Bluey to her godmother, before turning to her mother and asking “Do you think we’ll have a happy ending too?” “I don’t know,” replies Chili, “But I’m done trying to figure it out. I just wanna dance.” Queue the happy dance montage.

Still, providence has not finished working with the Heelers. On moving day, a whole host of minor events from previous episodes collide to cancel the sale of the Heeler’s beloved house. It’s hard to describe every little flap of the butterfly’s wing that impacted this outcome — a combination of stuck coins, romantic encounters at the drugstore, inchworms saved from being squished on the slip-and-slide, and overzealous real estate agents all played their part. In a moving montage, Bandit takes the call about the canceled sale of the home, changes his mind about the new job, symbolically rips the for-sale sign out of his front yard, and is tackled by a loving family who realize they don’t have to move anymore. The family sits on boxes in their empty kitchen floor eating takeout cheeseburgers, relieved of the anxiety of moving, while the show rolls to credits. The song playing in the background is called “Lazarus Drug,” sung by the same voice actor who plays preschool teacher Calypso. It’s a song about love drawing someone back to life, perhaps a nod to the love of Bandit’s family drawing him back to the reality that they may already have a great life, and money wouldn’t make it any better. The Heelers get their happy ending, too.

The Greeks were the first to use the storytelling tool we know by its Latin name: deus ex machina, God from the machine. In Greek drama, at the climax of a seemingly unsolvable problem, a machine (usually a trap door or crane) would lift or lower an actor onto the stage portraying one of the gods of the Greek pantheon. These gods would step in and provide a solution to a drama’s seemingly unsolvable and complex problem. Nowadays, the term is derisive, an insult that implies lazy writing or poor storytelling. At the time, however, the audience loved these deus ex machina solutions. At the risk of psychoanalyzing the past, one imagines they would have been quite happy to imagine that the Gods cared enough in the affairs of humans to intervene for a happy ending.

Deus ex machina is a criticism that can be leveled at this season finale. After all the adults tell the precocious preschooler that life gives out happy and sad endings, we are not given any sad endings. The only way to navigate change, according to the wisdom of the world, is sit back, embrace a sort of desireless “zen” regarding the future, and say “we’ll see,” but everyone nonetheless gets a happy ending. After bending over backwards to lay out how the future is fickle and unknowable, the show still insists on showing how everything lined up just perfectly for Bluey’s “prayers” to be answered. It’s not just her either. Aunt Brandy’s desire for a child comes to fulfillment, after we are told numerous times that it is not meant to be (S3E31). Winton’s divorced and depressed father meets the mother of the terrier triplets (S3E45), and the two come together and form a new family. The shaggy hair dogs get their house with a pool. Everything works out just fine. Despite the look of a Greek tragedy, in which everything ends poorly for the protagonists, things end up turning out fine, just like every Greek comedy. Or, to put it in Elizabethan terms, what starts out like Hamlet becomes A Mid-Summer Night’s Dream.

In Bluey’s world, the happy endings are real. The parents always muster enough energy to play with their kids. The right parenting lesson is always on hand, and handed down with pithy aphorisms. Hurt feelings are acknowledged and reconciled with emotionally intelligent strategies. The love shown between friendships and family members is realistic and optimistic. Moreover, in this square dog world of Brisbane, Australia, when parents and grandparents are at the end of their ropes, providence steps in to help guide the way. Happy endings are not so much earned in Bluey’s world as they are a given, or perhaps gifted, sometimes by tired and exhausted parents, but also, by an unseen benevolence watching over them. What is grace, after all, if not an unexpected happy ending?

So how did I respond to my son’s question? “Yes,” I told him, “there is a God in Bluey’s world. Who do you think made all those happy endings come true?” It’s not an answer I should have come up with so quickly. I’m not usually one to offer a succinct one-liner that sums up decades of media study and theology in a bite sized nugget for my four-year-old. Perhaps, instead, it was providence that gave the answer for me.

Article

Comment

Film & TV

Politics

Truth and Trust

13 November 2025

6 min read

The BBC and the Church of England: two giants, one crisis of trust

Will honourable resignations save the BBC—or anyone?

Tim Wyatt

Tim Wyatt is a journalist, and editor of The Critical Friend Substack.

TIm Davie, sits in an interview in front of screens showing facts about the BBC

Tim Davie, former BBC boss.

BBC.

Sometimes it seems like the BBC is never out of its own headlines. Just as one crisis is finally overcome, another erupts. This year alone we’ve seen outcry over a documentary on Gaza and the Glastonbury fiasco. Now, the broadcaster’s director general Tim Davie and head of news Deborah Turness have resigned over the latest scandal. A leaked internal dossier concluded a Panorama documentary on Donald Trump had misleadingly edited a speech he made on 6 January (it also raised questions over the BBC’s LGBT coverage and its Arabic language service).

Both Davie and Turness have insisted that the corporation is not biased in its coverage, even if mistakes had been made by its journalists and editors. But both found the pressure too much to bear. Speaking outside the BBC’s London HQ, Turness said:

“I stepped down over the weekend because the buck stops with me. But I'd like to make one thing very clear, BBC News is not institutionally biased. That's why it's the world's most trusted news provider."

She was right to identify trust as key. Can we trust the BBC to tell us what is going on in the world fairly and accurately, if it makes mistakes like these? Can we trust the individuals within the broadcaster to report the news impartially, regardless of their personal views? Indeed, can we trust those currently condemning the BBC to be acting in good faith, and not motivated by political hostility or commercial rivalry?

According to research by the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, the BBC is the most trusted news brand in Britain, with 60 per cent of people saying they have faith in its output. Some of its newspaper antagonists can muster barely a third of that trust score. An Ofcom survey from 2019 found an impressive 83 per cent of viewers of the BBC’s TV news output trusted it to be accurate.

But trust in the media overall is slipping away in Britain. A decade ago, 51 per cent of people told the Reuters Institute they trusted the news in general; a Brexit referendum, Covid pandemic and ten years of political turmoil later, that figure is just 35 per cent.

Trust in the BBC is one of its most precious commodities, part of what helps it stand out both in Britain and globally. This is why Davie and Turness decided to fall on their swords, despite nobody suggesting they had personally done much wrong. It has to preserve the trust of its audience at all costs and the price to pay has historically been that when someone messes up, the people at the top resign. We saw the same back in 2012 when the then director general George Entwhistle quit after just 54 days in the role after the BBC got sucked into the Jimmy Savile abuse scandal. In 2004, both the director general and chair of the BBC’s board had to resign in the wake of the suicide of Iraq War whistleblower David Kelly.

This – the regular spectacle of the ‘honourable’ resignation – is an increasing rarity in other parts of public life. In our post-truth post-shame political environment, it is more common for politicians to brazen out scandal and disgrace, and rarer for their party institutions to insist leaders fall on their swords. We lost count of how many scandals Boris Johnson survived as prime minister before he was finally felled by Partygate in 2022. Across the pond, Donald Trump has effectively rendered himself uncancellable by capturing the Republican Party and much of the US media ecosystem, despite corruption and growing authoritarianism. As the Guardian columnist Marina Hyde put it, “The BBC is the last place anyone still resigns from.”

And yet. There is an interesting counter-example from another storied British public institution battling to maintain relevance in the 21st century and wracked by scandal and division: the Church of England. Just a year ago it too suffered the ignominy of seeing its leader resign in disgrace. Justin Welby was forced to quit as Archbishop of Canterbury after he was criticised in an official review over John Smyth, one of the most prolific abusers in the church’s history.

Welby painted his resignation in similar terms: an honourable act of falling on his sword to take responsibility for the institution’s broader failings. In his cloth-eared valedictory speech in the House of Lords, the outgoing Archbishop told his fellow peers that “there comes a time, if you are technically leading a particular institution, when the shame of what has gone wrong, whether one is personally responsible or not, must require a head to roll.” And in this particular case, there was only “one head that rolls well enough”, Welby added; his own.

But did this supposedly principled act of resignation rebuild trust? Not really. In fact, it may have done the opposite and further damaged the public’s trust in its national church. Welby initially hesitated and refused to resign after the damning Smyth report was first published, only agreeing to go after a weekend of simmering outrage. The vibe was less 'honourable man falling on his sword' and more 'leader convinced they’d done little wrong reluctantly forced out against their will'.

And yet with the passing of time, his resignation has become mired in regret. Growing numbers of both bishops and others in the church have questioned just how liable he really was for the failure to stop Smyth’s abuse, and how robust the Makin report’s conclusions are. There is an increasing sense Welby was forced out in a rush to find a scapegoat, any scapegoat, to stem the bleeding and show that the church was taking it seriously.

His successful defenestration has radicalised the more hardline elements of the abuse survivor movement, encouraging them to try to topple their other despised enemies within the church hierarchy. Bishops now fear they will be next on the chopping block, regardless of their culpability; unsurprisingly this does not engender greater trust. In fact, many observers would suggest trust between the bishops and those in the pulpits and pews has never been lower in modern times. The tortured attempt to introduce blessings for gay couples has poisoned the well further, contributing to the system for appointing new bishops to begin to break down. Somehow, both the liberal and the conservative wings of the Church feel equally betrayed by the bishops’ actions during the gay blessings saga.

Trust is slowly earned, and quick to drain away. Even doing the honourable thing and resigning is no longer a surefire route to restore trust in our public institutions. Just as with Welby, it is likely these BBC resignations will not rebuild confidence in our national broadcaster. Instead, they may well further encourage the right-wing press and demagogues like Trump to scream “fake news” and hector impartial news outlets further. The resignations also tell the ordinary viewer and listener the accusations of bias must be true – otherwise why would these bigwigs have to stand down?

There are no easy lessons to read across from the Church of England’s battle to regain trust to the BBC. For years now bishops have been urging clergy and lay people to try to trust them once more, to put aside defensiveness and hostility and work together in vulnerable collaboration. And things have mostly only got worse. Trust cannot be willed back into existence, nor will it return through the bloodletting of high-profile ‘honourable’ resignations.

In fact, there’s a deeper problem which goes much further than the BBC or the Church of England. A deeper crisis of trust in society at large. For 25 years the Edelman Trust Barometer has been measuring societies around the world, and of 28 nations polled last year the UK’s average trust score was rock bottom: just 39 per cent of people on average said they trusted businesses, the government, or the media. In fact, almost everywhere people are running low on trust. Fears that government leaders and media elites purposely lie to us are at an all-time high. Until we can find ways to rebuild the ties that bind us, as individuals and communities, it is hard to see how the large institutions that used to shape British civic life – whether that is the BBC, the Church or parliament – can regain the public’s trust, resignations or no resignations.

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