Eyed from this context, Bandit’s character seems loaded with extra significance. Is he a four-legged counter-attack for gender equality? The truth is actually far more heartening: Bandit, it turns out, isn’t some figure of political allegory, but a straight-up depiction of the here and now.

The inspiration for Bluey is primarily observational, Brumm explains. In that respect, Bandit’s approach to parenting simply reflects the animator’s own experience and that of his circle of brothers and mates.

“He’s like every sort of caring dad these days,” Brumm says. “They’re across everything – the housework, kids, work, the lot. Compared to my dad’s day, we’ve just had a slow, generation-by-generation change to the point we’re at now, where being a dad just seems like an all-in.”

The “majority” of Bluey is biographical with Brumm sharing many characteristics with Bandit. He’s the father of two small girls too and, running his own animation company, he largely worked from home in their early years to become an active figure in their daily lives. “I mean Bandit is a much better dad than me,” he says. “But when you write a cartoon, you can obviously cut out the shortcomings that I have as a dad. Which are definitely numerous…”

Yet there’s one area, Brumm concedes, where Bluey does get “vaguely political”. The cartoon resolutely champions the importance of play.

Bluey was still in embryonic form when Brumm’s eldest daughter started school. Her experience changed the course of the show.

“Play time was suddenly taken away from her, it was just yanked and seeing the difference in her was horrendous,” he says. “There was no playing, there was no drawing, it was just straight into all this academic stuff. And the light in her eyes just died.”

The family subsequently changed their daughter’s schooling after Brumm began to research the value of play for child development. Mastering these soft kindergarten skills, he found, is a vital stage in kids’ evolution into socially aware creatures. Their make-believe games can deliver self-taught but powerful lessons about how to co-operate, share and interact.

“Bluey is just one long extrapolation of that,” Brumm says. “It’s to encourage people to look at play not just as kids mucking around, but as a really critical stage in their development that, I think, we overlook at their peril.”