Hacker T. Dog wants no introduction. He’s the canine who graced our screens on CBBC each day, the animal behind “we’re just innocent men”, a champion of Sue Barker, meat paste and milky brews. Mr. T. Dog was an unlimited a part of most of our childhoods, however the man who has been beneath the desk, animating the canine the entire time, is a little bit of an unsung hero. I sat down with Phil Fletcher, the puppeteer behind Hacker, to get to understand how the enduring character got here to our TV screens.
“When I was a little kid, I must have been about four, my mum and dad bought me a little emu puppet and I never took it off my hand,” Phil tells me. “I’ve done it ever since.” At 9, Phil was making puppets out of paper, and, at eleven, after some twiddling with a stitching machine, he made his first “proper puppet”, a personality referred to as Josh – “I still use Josh’s character to this very day.” After forming a band of characters, Phil started performing, beginning at youngsters events and college exhibits. “I’ve been making money from puppeteering since I was eleven, that’s thirty-five years doing this. I had no ambition to do anything else other than be a puppeteer.”
“The best thing about Hacker is that he’s real.”
Phil by no means “aspired to do telly” and was joyful working the cabaret puppet present he did for years. “Telly was just too niche so I thought I’d never get into it. I just tried to be the best I possibly could at the live stuff.” CBBC grew to become a actuality for Phil after a producer rang him and requested him to come back and interview: “It was literally out of the blue. I was in bed, watching Columbo and eating custard out of a bowl so I went for the audition and then I got the job.”
The rise of Hacker T. Dog is way from the everyday trajectory of a TV star, a lot in order that Phil describes his profession as “the flukiest job in showbusiness”. Hacker was supposed to be a short lived stand-in character: “It was meant to be a four month gig with me and Iain Stirling. We got thrown together and thrown on the telly. I thought – brilliant – I’ll do this four month gig and then go back to cabaret, it’ll be a good thing to whack on the CV.” But the job carried on: “it still hasn’t ended yet, that was fifteen years ago. It’s the longest four-month job in history.”
Unlike the remainder of Phil’s puppets, Hacker just isn’t one he made himself. “He was in a show called Scoop and he didn’t talk, he had no personality or anything.” The character communicated via barks and growls however, two months after beginning performing, Phil was despatched to Wimbledon to interview Sue Barker. “We had three minutes with her so no time to prepare. I just thought, ‘oh, bugger it’, Hacker will just start talking in English from now on.” His gamble labored, and from then on Hacker was the chatty canine that graced our screens and Phil was given full management over how Hacker acted. “The best thing about Hacker is that he’s real. He’s from Wigan – I’m from Wigan. He drinks milky brew, he’s an angry little git and I’m an angry little git. The only whimsical thing about him is that he’s a dog, other than that he’s a real bloke.”
“My whole career has been a blag”
The onscreen friendship between Hacker and Iain Stirling grew to become a cornerstone of the presenting job, however this friendship didn’t simply cease there. Iain and Phil lived collectively for about two and a half years; “our friendship was yet another fluke, we could have hated each other.” In their London flat, they spent their days “drinking and watching Alan Partridge, sometimes fannying around and making puppet characters in the middle of the night after a few bevs. The relationship on screen of Iain and Hacker being really good friends was completely real. We’re still good mates today.”
Phil operates on improvisation, doing no matter he thinks will get the largest laughs. “I never write anything, I’ve never written anything in my life – it’s always been ad-lib. Scripts get written at CBBC but I just ignore them and ad-lib around them and Hacker them up.” I ask Phil if this has ever gotten him into any bother he responds “maybe. I don’t really listen or pay their opinion any mind though, I’m Hacker.”
A puppeteer since 4, a performer since 11 and an icon of the silver display for the final decade and a half, Phil Fletcher’s profession is the stuff of desires. But I used to be shocked by simply how a lot appeared to come back to him by likelihood. A name out of nowhere from the BBC, a cut up second choice that made a canine speak, and a many years lengthy friendship with Iain Stirling all got here, as Phil says, as a “fluke”. “My whole career has been a blag,” he tells me. And, god, what a hell of a blag it has been.
