Against my better judgement, I put ‘Activate’ on BBC iPlayer for my 5 year old. In each five minute episode, an animated Joe Wicks, alongside his team of Activators – riotous, Skittles-hued monsters – perform a series of three exercises. The goal is to ‘fill’ up the flashing, psychedelic bars of the ‘totaliser’ by copying Joe’s moves. I watched as Avery squatted, star-jumped, and burpeed his way through the first episode. Have you ever seen a five year old attempt a burpee? It is extremely funny; take my word for it.
He gave the push ups in episode two a good punt before simply lying down on the floor. Episode three included mountain climbers. It looked like this: butt in the air while kind of running on the spot?? Again, very funny. It was at this point that I think he understood he was being manipulated. So, fulfilling Foucault’s prophecy, he sat down and started watching it like a regular TV show.
Activate is an evolution of Joe Wicks' popular PE With Joe YouTube series, which drew in 80 million viewers during the pandemic lockdowns of 2020-21, and earned him an MBE. Activate was made by Studio AKA (who also make Hey Duggee) and was funded by the government under Plan For Change. ‘This initiative directly supports our focus on giving children the best start in life’ said Health Secretary Wes Streeting. ‘By investing in prevention today, we’re building a healthier generation for tomorrow,’ continued the self-congratulatory little weasel.
Far from revolutionary, Activate seems to be riffing on already established creators in the ‘War On Couch Potatoes’ canon, like Danny Go or Cosmic Yoga. Yet Activate has a different quality than the goofy absurdity of Danny, or the preposterous pretense of a Pikachu pigeon pose. In these shows, it doesn’t really matter if the kids move much; they’re mostly just for fun and to assuage parental screen-time guilt. But it’s hard to rationalise making a 6 year old do burpees, unless you’re trying to shunt them down the pipeline to Gym Bro Town. When you strip back the kaleidoscopic animation and (admittedly funky) soundtrack of Activate, what you’re left with is indistinguishable from any old Joe Wicks workout. Sets of exercises targeting different muscle groups for a given number of reps.
And ‘work’ is the imperative here. However hard you try to dress it up as ‘fun’, push-ups, burpees, and mountain climbers are strenuous labour. Activate is not teaching children skills as in sports, or humility as in martial arts, or how to express themselves through their bodies as in dance. Activate breaks down the labour of bodily maintenance into a series of discreet, repetitive motions, not unlike methods of mass production on the assembly line. When Wes Streeting refers to ‘building a healthier generation’, he cements the idea of the body as ‘alienable property and a resource we are obligated to cultivate’. Children cannot simply exist in their bodies, they must manufacture bodies that will not break down or require maintenance.
The imagery of industry is suffused into modern-day fitness culture. The treadmill is a conveyor belt under our feet. Our legs compress pads attached to weights like a piston moving up and down. The rowing machine is a system of ropes and pulleys, requiring effort and strain. ‘Nothing can make you believe we harbor nostalgia for factory work but a modern gym’ writes Mark Greif in Against Everything. ‘With the gym, we import vestiges of the leftover equipment of industry to our leisure’.
