Joe Wicks is doing some burpees. He is being his usual Joe Wicks self, shouting matey encouragement as his lustrous hair bobs up and down in time. If you watched PE With Joe, his daily lockdown-era YouTube series, it will be familiar. However, there is one important distinction. Wicks is now exercising in a void, surrounded by fuzzy little aliens. Welcome to Activate, his new frontier in getting children moving.
“Obviously, PE With Joe had so much impact, and I’m so proud of that,” Wicks says over Zoom. “But I had this niggling feeling that I couldn’t do this for ever. I can’t visit every school because thousands and thousands apply for me to visit every year.”
Activate is Wicks’ answer to this problem. A collaboration with Studio AKA, which makes the magnificent Hey Duggee, it’s a series of five-minute animated workout videos in which he appears as a bright, animated avatar, guiding the viewer through a set of bodyweight exercises. These are no joke; the first episode is a lightly punishing round of squats, star jumps and burpees that would probably reduce a lot of adults to sweaty puddles.
Activate is fun, visually beautiful and committed to making kids more active. In other words, it’s classic public service broadcasting. Which makes it even more baffling that nobody wanted anything to do with it at first.
“No broadcaster could recognise or identify where it would go in their scheduling,” says Sue Goffe, CEO of Studio AKA. “We just kept getting turned down by everybody.”
“We tried, man, we really, really tried,” sighs Wicks. “People loved it, but weren’t willing to invest. So we said, ‘You know what? We gotta make this happen ourselves.’”
“Joe and [his brother] Nikki are contagious,” says Goffe. “They are a delightful, formidable duo of energy, compassion and kindness. You can’t be unaffected by it, so we had to carry on. Roll forward to where we are now and we could never have imagined we would be here.”
Where they are now is on YouTube. A few years ago, this would have been seen as a defeat but, in the past year or so, YouTube has become arguably the most dominant method of content consumption on Earth. Much of its colossal audience comprises kids, so now there’s a real sense that Activate is meeting its target audience where it lives.
Furthermore, as soon as the first episode was complete, partners started rolling in. Universal Music has lent the series its catalogue – the first episode is soundtracked by Elton John’s I’m Still Standing – and now it has partnered with the British government. Wes Streeting, the secretary of state for health and social care, was at the launch this week, and there are pledges to fund and promote the next batch of episodes.
I poke Wicks a bit, try to get him to gloat over all the broadcasters that turned him down, but he’s having none of it. “Success for me isn’t government backing,” he says. “The win for me is more kids exercising and doing these at home with their parents, doing them in school.”
“I really think this is going to make a big difference to children’s health,” adds Goffe. “You know, it’s a big issue. One in five children are leaving school with obesity. That’s a terrible statistic. If we can contribute to making content that makes a difference, that’s a win.”
It’s only natural that Activate will be compared with PE With Joe, and for good reason. That was the moment when Wicks – then a fitness instructor with boundless ambition and infinite enthusiasm for taking his top off – became a national treasure. He is now as synonymous with lockdown as banana bread and hitting saucepans on the doorstep. But PE With Joe had two things Activate doesn’t. First, it was just Wicks filming himself in his living room so it was cheap to make. Second, it gave lots of bored people an opportunity to spend some of their day looking at Joe Wicks. Meanwhile, Activate is expensive to produce and shows Wicks as a cartoony animation.
This is something the producers wrestled with. “We were always trying to figure out, well, why is it animated?” says Kristian Andrews, who directed the series with Marcus Armitage. “Obviously, Joe has a massively successful schools tour where he’s engaging with kids, but he is just one person. And we pretty quickly realised when we were having these conversations with various broadcasters that, actually, not everyone knows Joe Wicks. Also he’s not, you know, the face of diversity. That was an opportunity to broaden it out by giving him some funny little characters to exercise with.”
Plus, like everyone, Wicks isn’t getting any younger. “I love what I do, but there’s going to come a time where I probably can’t film the high-intensity HiiT workouts any more,” he says. “This is a scalable way of getting into schools, getting into homes.”
But simple immortality isn’t enough for Wicks. He has far greater ambitions. “My dream, my moonshot, is that the education department makes it compulsory that every single day kids in primary schools do an Activate,” he adds. “That could really lift their mood and their focus – and their grades and their mental health – beyond anything else. I’m going to really push for that.”
Even without a government initiative, this would seem likely. Primary teachers are crying out for cheap, quick and easy ways to get children moving. Plenty of schools already do a Daily Mile, where pupils go outside and walk around but, to the uninitiated, this tends to have an air of prison exercise. Something as vibrant and fun as Activate could change all that. Having a five-minute break between subjects to jump up and down at the behest of some irresistibly cute animated Minionesque characters seems a no-brainer.
There will be more episodes after this first batch and the nature of how they are produced – they are, in their most essential terms, a series of looping animations – means they will become cheaper to make. This is a good thing, because everyone involved has high hopes for Activate. There are suggestions that, through the Universal partnership, musical acts will want to collaborate in animated form. And, although the current focus is on the UK, there are hopes the idea will translate internationally. But, at its core, Activate will always be a manifestation of one man’s desire to change the world five minutes at a time.
“I have a genuine love for it,” Wicks says of his desire to get kids moving. “You might not love everything I say, or I might piss you off, but my intentions are good – and my intention is to help people. This is the most exciting thing I’m working on. PE With Joe, that moment is gone. I always said I’ll never do anything more meaningful than that. But if I can create change in the education system and push to make exercise the number one priority, I think that could be my greatest achievement.”