Scoop (British TV series)

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Scoop is a children's TV series first broadcast by the BBC on the CBBC channel from 5 January 2009 to 10 August 2011.^[1]

The show stars Shaun Williamson as Digby Digworth, an ambitious but inept journalist for a fictional local newspaper, The Pilbury Post. Each episode centres on Digby's failure to get a scoop, ending up causing mayhem and disaster instead. In each of these he is accompanied by Hacker, a dog. The show also stars Mark Benton as the newspaper's short-tempered editor, Max de Lacey and there are guest appearances by popular British TV actors such as Lesley Joseph and Mina Anwar who plays Selena Sharp, reporter for a rival paper. In one episode the famous children's writer J. K. Rowling is parodied as a novelist character called T. K. Towling, while in another Jeremy Clarkson (ex Top Gear presenter) is satirised with the character Clark Jameson.

The episodes are 28 minutes in length and were originally stripped (broadcast every day) across weekdays on BBC One at 3.25 pm between 5 January and 23 January.

Hacker T. Dog, a Border Terrier puppet character, made his first appearance on this show. He was later used as a presenter on the CBBC TV channel. Hacker appeared presenting the CBBC channel from 23 May 2009 with Iain Stirling, a comedian from Edinburgh. In series 1 of Scoop he was operated by Andy Heath, but when he began presenting CBBC he was operated by Phil Fletcher who has puppeteered Hacker since.

A second season began airing in September 2010 and a third began airing a new episode every day from 25 July.