Master dog trainer Graeme Hall is a much-loved, familiar face on TV thanks to his Channel 5 series ‘Dogs Behaving (Very) Badly’. Travelling the length and breadth of the country, Graeme meets frazzled dog owners from every walk of life who share one thing in common: their pet’s behaviour is causing problems and they need Graeme’s help to fix it.
We caught up with Graeme as the seventh series of ‘Dogs Behaving (Very) Badly' arrives on our television screens. With the show a firm fixture in the schedules, we found out what Graeme thinks is the secret to the show's success, what he finds challenging about making it and where his distinctive dress sense came from.
Join us as we talk film crews, Land Rovers, different kinds of reactive dog and much more besides!
There’s a brand new series of ‘Dogs Behaving (Very) Badly’ starting on the 7th January. What are you excited about for this season?
After seven years you'd think the excitement would have died down a bit, but I actually think this might be the best series ever. I'll let other people be the judge of that. But we always try and get the right mix of dramatic, heartfelt and funny stories. I think we've struck that balance. We have some fascinating stories, including issues I've never seen before, which takes a bit of doing after all these years! I think the first episode's a cracker.
You mention this is the seventh series, and you’ve even filmed a few in Australia. What do you think is the secret to the show's success?
The obvious mistake to make is to say it's all about me, and it's clearly not. It's about the dogs. I think there's an element of schadenfreude to it. We all love to see other people's badly behaved dogs. Many people tell me when they watch the show, it makes them feel good because their dog's not as bad as that. And it has a sense of humour. Dog training can be a pretty serious business. I don’t ever remember Barbara Woodhouse cracking a joke. Which is odd because dogs do funny things all the time. I think it's lovely to celebrate that. But there are times when the funny things that dogs do become a bit too much – and that’s where I come in. But that doesn't mean we can't have a bit of fun along the way. There's an element of the detective story to it sometimes. It’s finding out what on earth is going on, and of course the next question is: what on earth am I going to do to fix it?
You’re like a Sherlock Holmes of dog training. Would you say you read the psychology of the owners as much as their dogs in coming up with a solution to their problem?
You definitely need to look at both sides of it, that's for sure. And I think that's where traditional dog training ends: it's all about training the dog. But there's a huge piece of the puzzle around training people. Sometimes people say it's always about the owner and there's no such thing as a bad dog. My stock answer to that is: you've not met some that I've met. Some of them are tricky, let's say. When you look at what people are doing with their dogs that often gives you a clue. So for example, the owner will tell me: my dog does this weird and wonderful thing – he sings in a particular pitch to me, and it only happens to me. He doesn't do it with my partner. And I say, “Oh, that's interesting. What do you do when he sings?” They say, “Well, I find it kind of funny.” So they’re smiling and laughing. So I ask if they think he likes it when they smile and laugh. They say, “Sure he does.” So the dog's doing it to them because they are the only person who responds and he quite likes a bit of attention. Sometimes, once you've sussed it, the answer becomes obvious. We can be so close to the problem that it takes an outsider to see it.
Tell me how you see the audience you’re building up for the show. I often watch it with my mum. We both have dogs who are lovely but reactive. I have a friend whose children love it for the clips of dogs doing silly things, while he watches it for the human stories. Do you aim for a broad appeal?
I often think, if I was watching this, what would I need to understand? How would it become obvious to me that that was the right answer to this particular conundrum? So I'm always conscious that there's an audience watching. The bottom line is: it's just me doing what I do. Reactive dogs is an interesting example. You could have two dogs who bark at you for completely different reasons and you would go about remedying that in two completely different ways. This happened many years ago before I was on telly. A person with a German Shepherd walked down the street with his dog barking like crazy because he's reactive. The dog's quite a scaredy cat and he just wants the other dogs to go away, right? He's discovered that if he barks and snarls and looks horrible, the other dogs and their owners go away. So the dog thinks: fantastic, barking works, right? A week later I see another German Shepherd dog in a different place. That dog's also barking at other dogs like crazy and looks pretty ferocious. But actually, this dog wants to play. If you don’t know what you're looking at, they look very similar. If you were to turn around and go the opposite direction as soon as your dog barks, that would be a negative consequence for the dog who wants to play, so doing that might decrease that behaviour. But if you treat your reactive dog in exactly the same way, the dog things, “Fantastic, I’ll bark at other dogs again next time!” and you’ve made your problem worse, not better. Two German Shepherd dogs, both barking at other dogs. You do the same thing with both of them. One of them gets better. One of them gets worse. Isn't that interesting?
That rings very true because our reactive dog is half German Shepherd, and thanks to you I have questioned if I’m rewarding bad behaviour on walks. The series has been running long enough now that you've come across some dogs previously, where the owners have got back in touch with a new problem. Once you’ve already gotten inside a dog’s head and come to know the owners, is it easier to find a solution?
Sometimes! But it’s a double-edged sword. I’ll be on my way there thinking, “Oh, I remember this dog, he ain't so bad.” And then you get there and… let’s just say he's changed in two years! So your preconception sometimes doesn't help you. The trick there is to keep an open mind. Just like a dog you've never met before, you still don't really know what you're going into, but there are times when you get into it and think, “Okay, I can see why you're doing this, because I know you're not a scary dog, you're a scared dog.” It's always nice going back, particularly when I first met them when they were very young. There have been a few that there were around ten months old when we first got them on the right track, but then there’s a new problem to solve.
Your job must give you immense satisfaction when you get to help so many people with their pets. But is there anything you like less about making the show?
What drives me, as corny as this might sound, is helping people. But when you're doing this on the telly, it's a twofold job. You're there to do with the best you can with the dog and for the owner. But you're also thinking of the best way to tell the story in a way that works on telly, which means it has be pretty visually. The whole process of making telly is very slow. It’s very much, “We'll need to do that a couple of times, Graeme, because we've only got two cameras. We need it from the front, we need it from behind.” And, “That thing you just said was great, but we weren't pointing a camera at you. Could you say that again?” You get used to it, but it can be quite frustrating. The truth is I could do twice as much dog training in the time available if I didn't have a TV camera with me. There are three stories in every episode. For one, we may come back a couple of times, as we did with the deaf Dalmatian in the first episode. People often ask: do you do all that training and fix the problem in one day? I say, “No. It's about two hours in the afternoon.” Because the rest of the day was about telling the story. I have to see the problem because the camera's got to see it. We go outside and maybe something doesn't go right, so we do it again. And then there's the revelation, when I'm sitting down and chatting to the owners and explaining the problem and what we need to do to fix it. We'll stop for lunch briefly because dogs need a break as well. So the training part often doesn't start until after 2pm. And if we're training outside in winter, it's getting dark at four o'clock, so the pressure's on! To turn it around though, I love it when people come up to me in the street and say, “We watched your show and we have this dog and we did what you did with a dog on the telly that had the same problem, and it really helped, thanks very much.” That's always great. I'm hopefully not just helping one person. We're potentially helping thousands.
Connected to that, you also write books that offer guidance for dog owners. We reviewed and very much enjoyed ‘The Ultimate Kid’s Guide to Dogs’ last year. Do you enjoy the writing process and going on books tours as much as making the show?
I've got to say, I find writing hard work. I'm a bit of a perfectionist. When I wrote my first one, the publishers very kindly gave me a writing consultant to work with who could teach me how to do it. I'd been writing articles for ‘The Sunday Times' and ‘Countryside Magazine' and so on before that, so I thought, yeah, great. But I think I drove them around the twist with questions about grammar! I bought myself one of the writing guides and all the rest of it. My approach is to just write anything down and write as I speak. You can smooth it out afterwards. By the time we get to the end, I'm pleased with it. It’s funny you mentioned the kids’ book for two reasons: I think it might be my favourite book, because first, it wasn’t 70,000 words to write, but 10,000, and the second thing is I worked with Alice Tait who did the illustrations and they’re great. Anybody who knows me will tell you I'm a bit of a big kid really, so it's quite easy to write a book for kids. I was chatting to the publishers about the age range we were aiming at. At one point I asked, “Should we include something about dog poo?” And they said, “Oh, heck yeah! Kids love talking about poo.” So there's a section about dog poo and your responsibility picking it up and all the rest of it. It was great fun. That leads to book festivals and talks on stage. I did a theatre tour in 2022 which went really well. I was terrified to start with. Making television is one thing. Even live television, as I appear on things like ‘This Morning’. But you don't actually see the audience with TV. In a theatre you get a few hundred people staring at you thinking, “Right, come on, entertain us, we paid our money”! It's scary to start with, but I found that interaction with an audience is great and I love doing a question and answer section. You can have a lot of fun with an audience.
You must be asked some great questions!
The best question I've ever been asked live on stage was, “Are you married? And if not, would you marry me?” How do you answer that? No, but as good as, and thank you for your very kind offer was my considered response! I never thought that would happen when I started dog training all of those years ago.
I wonder if it’s connected to your wonderful sartorial taste. I associate dog walking with wearing my scruffs, but you're the best dressed man on telly! How did your very distinctive look come about?
Well, thank you very much! It's 80% me and 20% television razzmatazz. The 20% is the cravat. I often would turn up to a job wearing a tweed jacket. Jeans are quite practical, so that was always good. I live in Northamptonshire, and I've always liked proper English shoes because famously they're made in Northamptonshire. Although I'm a Yorkshireman I've lived down here for years. But the factory shops means that you can buy decent quality English shoes for a lot less money: that's where the Yorkshireman bit comes in. Decent shoes, tweed jackets and a waistcoat now and again: that was always me. Then our executive producer before we did series one said, “What about a cravat just to finish it off?” I remember growing up, my dad had lots of cravats in the wardrobe. So I thought, why not? And I put one on. It's the icing on the cake. So that became the look. All of those things are quite practical. But the thing about a proper wax cotton jacket is they can never be too smart. You should always have them a bit scruffy.
I love tweed and Barbour jackets myself. You don’t see enough of them these days.
Well, there you go. I quite like a lot of old-fashioned things. Although I've got a modern Land Rover, I've started off with a very old one.
I guess you need a good, reliable car for driving up and down the country visiting dogs and their owners?
The thing I spend most time on when I’m at home and not doing dog training things is motorsport. I've got a competition MGB 1967. As racy cars go, that's quite old-fashioned. But with my Land Rover, for series six and this new seventh one, I've got my new one. The old one did me so well. It's done a quarter of a million miles. I put it through an MOT last year thinking that if it fails spectacularly, maybe this is it, because it’s already retired. But it passed without a single advisory. I said, “I think I'll keep this.” So I'm a man with two white Discoveries! Seems very extravagant, but if they're running, keep them. It's nice to have a scruffy one when you need to go and pick up a few logs or something like that, and the fancy new one. That's luxury, waking up in the morning and wondering which Land Rover shall I take? I don't think fame has quite gone to my head because that's my idea of extravagance!
The first episode of the seventh series sees Graeme meet a deaf Dalmatian with boundless energy, a cocker spaniel with a stick obsession, and a Bantam Bulldog who loves to chase the local park wildlife. ‘Dogs Behaving (Very) Badly' airs Tuesdays at 8pm on Channel 5.
