Spot the Dog
Witness History
BBC
4.5 • 1.6K Ratings
🗓️ 18 August 2025
⏱️ 11 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
In 1978, British artist Eric Hill designed an interactive book about a yellow puppy for his two-year-old son, Chris.
Eric had noticed Chris kept lifting up the paper he was working on to see what was underneath and it inspired him to come up with a new format for a children’s book - lift-the-flap.
Since Where’s Spot? was published in 1980, more than 65 million copies of Spot books have been sold worldwide, in more than 60 languages.
Rachel Naylor speaks to Eric’s son, Chris Hill.
Eye-witness accounts brought to life by archive. Witness History is for those fascinated by the past. We take you to the events that have shaped our world through the eyes of the people who were there. For nine minutes every day, we take you back in time and all over the world, to examine wars, coups, scientific discoveries, cultural moments and much more. Recent episodes explore everything from the death of Adolf Hitler, the first spacewalk and the making of the movie Jaws, to celebrity tortoise Lonesome George, the Kobe earthquake and the invention of superglue. We look at the lives of some of the most famous leaders, artists, scientists and personalities in history, including: Eva Peron – Argentina’s Evita; President Ronald Reagan and his famous ‘tear down this wall’ speech; Thomas Keneally on why he wrote Schindler’s List; and Jacques Derrida, France’s ‘rock star’ philosopher. You can learn all about fascinating and surprising stories, such as the civil rights swimming protest; the disastrous D-Day rehearsal; and the death of one of the world’s oldest languages.
(Photo: Eric Hill with Spot in 1984. Credit: Ted Bath / Daily Express / Hulton Archive / Getty Images)
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hi, this is the Witness History podcast from the BBC World Service. I'm Rachel Nela, one of the presenters. |
| 0:10.1 | We're the podcast that takes you back to a key moment in history and we bring it all to life through |
| 0:14.3 | incredible archive and the amazing memories of a key witness. Episodes are just nine minutes long |
| 0:18.8 | and come out every weekday. If that sounds like your thing, make sure you subscribe wherever you get your BBC podcasts and turn your push notifications on so you never miss an episode. For the amazing story I've got for you today, we're going back to London in the 70s and the birth of a yellow puppy, Spot the Dog. Eric Hills-Wares Spot was one of the first ever lift the flatbooks for children, |
| 0:38.9 | and I've been speaking to his son for whom he wrote it. |
| 0:46.3 | It's 1978 and we're in London. Artist Eric Hill has noticed his two-year-old son |
| 0:51.9 | keeps lifting the paper he's working on to see what's |
| 0:54.6 | underneath. I did spend a lot of time as a young kid in his studio and I absolutely loved |
| 1:01.0 | all the drawings he was doing and, you know, when he would have a bunch of pages out on his desk, |
| 1:06.6 | it was definitely a favorite pastime of mine and probably occasionally a great annoyance to him. |
| 1:12.8 | I'm sure me rifling to the papers wasn't always the best idea, but he probably saw how enthusiastic I was about what's under here, what's under there, what's under here. |
| 1:21.7 | That's Chris Hill, Eric's son. |
| 1:24.5 | Chris's curiosity inspired Eric to come up with an innovative new format for a children's book, |
| 1:29.7 | Lift the Flap. |
| 1:31.4 | He also discovered a gap in the market, a book for toddlers, |
| 1:34.7 | as he told the Hennepin County Library in Minnesota in the USA in 1988. |
| 1:39.4 | At that time, they were from beautiful children's books, very illustrated and lots of words. |
| 1:45.4 | And I felt maybe I could do my own interpretation with large, clear words and very clear pictures, |
| 1:52.5 | which was my style. |
| 1:53.7 | And also including the use of flaps, which, incidentally, is not pop-ups. |
| 1:58.0 | They are flaps that meant to be very simply attached and opened. |
| 2:01.1 | So I sat down and made up a dummy of the book and read it to Chris and he loved it. |
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