the dog ate my homework presenter

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The Dog Ate My Homework

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• Iain Stirling
• Susan Calman
• 2 wins & 4 nominations total

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• January 17, 2014 (United Kingdom)
• United Kingdom
• BBC Children's
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• Runtime 28 minutes

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Badge of honour: Adam Beales named as Blue Peter’s 40th presenter

Three million viewers already follow “Adam B” on YouTube. Won’t this BBC job get in the way of his video pranks?

Name: Adam Beales.

Appearance: About 15.

Occupation: BBC entertainer.

Is he still in East Enders? That’s Ian Beale . This is Adam Beales, who has just been announced as the 40th Blue Peter presenter .

Fortieth? The studio will be very crowded. Fortieth ever, since the venerable children’s show first aired back in 1958.

A lot of history there. Indeed. Beales will be following in the footsteps of , Valerie Singleton, John Noakes, Lesley Judd, Richard Bacon, Anthea Turner, Konnie Huq and exactly 33 others.

Over the years Blue Peter has plucked a lot of people from obscurity and set them on the road to fame and fortune, hasn’t it? Yes. It has returned a fair few to obscurity as well.

Let’s hope that isn’t the case with young Adam whatsisname. Don’t worry about Adam. He’s already a presenter on the CBBC show The Dog Ate My Homework .

I will take your word for it that there is such a show. And before that he was already fairly well known to his YouTube followers .

Sure, but how many YouTube followers does a kid like that have? 2.97 million.

Holy cats. What does he do? He describes it as “a not so funny person, trying to act funny in front of a camera”.

Sounds great. The videos largely consist of Beales – known as Adam B – larking about in the family home in Derry, and playing pranks on his long-suffering younger brother Callum.

And people like that sort of thing? His most popular videos have exceeded 20m views. And he has done promotional deals with Disney.

So you can really make money just by filming yourself playing pranks on your brother? It would seem so. In May, he bought his parents a new house.

It sounds as if the Blue Peter gig might be a bit underwhelming for him. On the contrary – Beales is super-excited. “I am humbled and ecstatic to be part of such a legendary production,” he said. His first live show airs this week.

Still, he must be worried about taking a pay cut to work for the BBC. Unlikely. In the video he posted to announce his new job, Beales explained to his followers that he will spend half his week filming Blue Peter, and the other half back in Derry making Callum’s life hell for fun and profit. Then he gave them a tour of his swanky new Manchester flat.

Well, this certainly sounds like a huge opportunity for the BBC. I’m sure they’ll learn a lot.

Do say: “Give this kid a Blue Peter badge for entrepreneurship.”

Don’t say: “You’re nothing without Callum!”

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The Dog Ate My Homework

Two teams fight it out to dodge detention, and put the cool back into school, in a mischievous mix of tongue-in-cheek comedy, off-the-wall questions, nonsensical studio games and slapstick challenges.

Official site: www.bbc.co.uk

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Iain Stirling

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CBBC commissions panel show for kids

Monday 9th September 2013, 2:43pm

CBBC has commissioned a new panel show format aimed at children.

The Dog Ate My Homework is described as "the show that finally puts the cool back into school".

The ten-part series will be hosted by Iain Stirling . The young stand-up comedian will already be familiar to the channel's viewers, having served as an on-screen continuity links presenter next to puppet character Hacker T. Dog, and as a presenter of shows including Help! My Supply Teacher Is Magic .

The Scottish comedian left his CBBC role earlier in the year to concentrate more on his stand-up career, and most recently performed the show Ian Stirling: At Home at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe. However, at the time of leaving his CBBC role, Stirling did indicate he would be looking to work with the channel again, and he hosted a pilot episode of this new panel show format earlier in the year.

Having now commissioned a full series based on that pilot, CBBC Commissioner Cheryl Taylor , who previously held the role of BBC Comedy Commissioner, has described the series as "the CBBC answer to Mock The Week ".

The format will see two teams facing "a mischievous mix of tongue-in-cheek comedy, off-the-wall questions, nonsensical studio games, and slapstick challenges". Each team will be composed of comedians and celebrity guests, with a 'junior sidekick' selected to help too.

The BBC describes The Dog Ate My Homework as "the school-based panel show that lets you down, lets CBBC down, and above all, lets itself down", adding that it is a series which "throws out the text books along with the rule book, and turns everything about school on its head".

The Dog Ate My Homework will be filmed in Glasgow from the end of this month, with recordings starting as early as 8:30am. To apply to be in the audience see our free tickets page

Following the success of Horrible Histories , CBBC is undertaking a commissioning strategy around the ethos "laugh yourself smart". Other comedy formats in development for the channel include a 'geek sitcom' pilot called Totally Square .

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Where Did The Phrase “The Dog Ate My Homework” Come From?

Dogs are known as man’s best friend. Dogs keep us safe, are hard workers … and can provide a handy excuse in a pinch. Maybe that’s why versions of the classic expression the dog ate my homework have been around for hundreds of years.

Today, the dog ate my homework is used as a stock example of the kind of silly excuses schoolchildren give for why their work isn’t finished. Very rarely do people say, “the dog ate my homework” and expect it to be taken literally; they use the expression as an example of a typically flimsy excuse.

So where did the phrase come from?

Forrest Wickman, a writer for Slate , describes the legend of the 6th-century Saint Ciarán of Clonmacnoise as the alleged first recorded “the dog ate my homework” story. According to the tale, Saint Ciarán had a tame young fox that would take his writings to his master for him. One day, the fox grew up and decided to eat the leather strap binding the writings together instead. Still, this tale is more Garden-of-Eden parable and less terrible schoolchild excuse.

The notion that dogs will eat just about anything, including paper, turns up in lots of stories over the centuries. An example comes from The Humors of Whist , published in 1808 in Sporting Magazine . In the story, the players are sitting around playing cards when one of them remarks that their companion would have lost the game had the dog not eaten the losing card. Good boy.

Some attribute the creation of the dog ate my homework to a joke that was going around at the beginning of the 20th century. In a tale found as far back as an 1894 memoir by Anglican priest Samuel Reynolds Hole, a preacher gives a shortened version of a sermon because a dog got into his study and ate some of the pages he had written. However, the clerk loved it because they had been wanting the preacher to shorten his sermons for years.

According to the Oxford English Dictionary , the first example of the dog ate my homework excuse in print can be found in a speech given by retiring headmaster James Bewsher in 1929 and published in the Manchester Guardian : “It is a long time since I have had the excuse about the dog tearing up the arithmetic homework.” The way this comment is phrased suggests that the whole dog ate my homework story had been around for some time before it was put in print.

When was the word homework created?

But in order for a dog to eat homework specifically, homework had to be invented (oh, and how we wish it hadn’t been). True, the word homework , as in what we call today housework , appears as early as 1653. But homework , as in school exercises to be done at home, isn’t found until 1852. Once we had homework , it was only a matter of time before the dog was accused of eating it.

How we use this phrase now

No matter the origin, sometime in the 1950s, the expression became set as the dog ate my homework . This inspired any number of riffs on the theme, like my cow ate my homework or my brother ate my homework . In the 1960s, the dog ate my homework continued to gain popularity. The expression popped up a couple times in politics over the years, like when President Reagan said to reporters in 1988, “I had hoped that we had marked the end of the ‘dog-ate-my-homework’ era of Congressional budgetry … but it was not to be.”

It seems unlikely that the dog ate my homework was ever used consistently or frequently by actual schoolchildren. In fact, it’s the unlikeliness of the story that makes it so funny and absurd as a joke. Instead, teachers and authority figures appear to have cited the dog ate my homework many times over the years as such a bad excuse they can’t believe students are really using it.

In the 21st century, students don’t spend as much time working with physical pen and paper as they once did. That may contribute to the decline in the use of the phrase. So, maybe soon we’ll see a new equally absurd phrase pop up. Come on Zoomers, you’ve got this.

WATCH: What's A Unique Homework Routine That Works?

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The Dog Ate My Homework

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