Songfacts®:

• Bob the Builder was a BBC UK animated TV character whose voice was supplied by the actor Neil Morrissey. "Can We Fix It?" was Bob the Builder's catch phrase, a question directed to his fellow workers when presented with a challenge.
• All Saints, Robbie Williams and Eminem all had big hits in Britain in 2000, but the musical construction project "Can We Fix It?" outsold them all to become the biggest selling single in the UK that year with 853,000 copies. It went on to become the most successful single in BBC history, topping 1 million in sales by June 2001. It was also a #1 hit in Australia.
• The song's composer, Paul Joyce, was originally in a band called Sense who had a hit single in France called "Jamie." In 1989 he turned his attention to writing and performing music for television and he has written theme tunes for many British TV programs. He recalls in 1000 UK #1 Hits by Jon Kutner and Spencer Leigh, "I wrote the song quite quickly as I was well briefed about what the producers were looking for. The phrase 'Can we fix it' was already established in the script so the challenge was to use it in the song in a way that would be both strong and appeal to kids and adults alike."
  
  The song's vocalist Neil Morrissey explains in the same publication, "We had the biggest selling single of the year 2000, which is a nice thing to get, and we were up against all kinds of people. We knocked Eminem off the #1 spot and stopped Westlife matching a Beatles record of eight straight #1s."
• This song prevented Westlife from having an eighth consecutive UK #1 with "What Makes A Man," which was walled in at #2 by Bob the Builder.
• In 2001 Bob The Builder returned to the UK #1 spot with his version of "Mambo No 5," a lyrical rewrite of Lou Bega's mambo track which had also hit the top almost exactly two years earlier.
• There were brief discussions about reviving the song during Barack Obama's 2008 US presidential campaign, inspired by the overlap with the slogan "Yes We Can."
  
  "When Barack Obama came into office and kept saying 'Yes we can,' I thought, 'Here's a chance – let's call Bruce Springsteen and see if he'd record a version,'" the song's vocalist Neil Morrissey recalled to The Guardian.
  
  However, they ultimately shelved the idea to avoid controversy. "Hit Entertainment, who owned the rights, weren't interested. I don't think they wanted Bob to be political in any way," Morrissey explained.