Of course, Don’t Hug Me I’m Scared is far from the first thing to use the basic jumping off point of ‘Sesame Street, but violent and for adults’. Peter Jackson made Meet The Feebles in the 1980s, and stage musical Avenue Q has been a hit around the world. Even just last year Jim Henson’s son Brian teamed Melissa McCarthy with some foul-mouthed muppets in The Happytime Murders, albeit to complete critical and commercial failure.

None of those feel at all similar to DHMIS though. Instead of shock value, it is filled with existential dread. “There’s no swearing or bad language in it, it’s more kind of mood,” says Terry. "It’s more insidious than just swearing puppets that jizz everywhere and vomit.

“We’re not trying to make people disgusted. We wouldn’t want to become too brutal. Sometimes what fun is trying to [provoke the audience] without doing the obvious.”

Pelling: “The reason people kept coming back to was that this story was interesting, and the characters were something they bought into. If it was just that at the two-minute mark of every episode, you dumped a bucket of guts to the ground, people would stop coming back.”

“Without sounding too up our own arses,” concludes Terry, “it’s more a visual arts take on weird puppets, than a parody.”

To illustrate his point, take for instance the previously mentioned fifth episode. It starts with The Red Guy suspiciously absent. The Yellow Guy and The Duck Guy are then accosted by singing food stuffs, and it is vaguely implied that The Red Guy may have been eaten. An ominous red phone rings, interrupting the song, and we get flashes to a hospital ward, maybe suggesting this is actually all just a television show being observed by a hallucinating patient. But then at one point, the camera is knocked over, and we see the it is all just the studio, and the legs of The Red Guy are clearly visible.

What does it all mean? No explanation is given, but the lack of answers has only made fans more devoted. They go through every frame with a fine tooth comb. YouTube explainer videos have racked up almost as many views as the originals. But the creators are in no rush to spell it all out.

“I think it is quite boring, this impulse to explain everything,” says Pelling. “I hope that people take all those [explainer videos] with a pinch of salt. Don’t just believe all of them – they all seem to contradict themselves anyway.”

“It’s not fun for anyone,” agrees Sloan. “I don’t think it would be fun for them either, if we just went ‘This is a metaphor for this’”.