'Genuine love for it' Virtual Joe Wicks hopes to get kids moving

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.

- Stuart Heritage

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, all this will sound very 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's 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 where he appears as a bright, animated avatar, guiding the viewer through a set of bodyweight exercises.

And they're no joke either; the first episode is a lightly punishing round of squats, star jumps and burpees that would probably reduce a lot of adults to panting sweaty puddles.