With genitalia proudly exposed, the amphibian raced up the charts in 2005 and irritated much of the UK. Why has it been allowed a second chance? Its handler explains himself

For a few months in 2005, you couldn’t move without encountering Crazy Frog. First sold as a ringtone, his nonsensical catchphrase, “Rring ding ding ding baa baa”, entered the national vocabulary. Then it became the most popular – and divisive – single of 2005, coupled with a CGI video of an explicitly naked frog on the lam in a futuristic cityscape. “The frog is irritating to the point of distraction and back again,” wrote BBC News. “And yet at the same, it’s strangely compelling.”

The craze lasted for five Top 20 hits and then mercifully dwindled. The character was so hated that hackers found success with a virus offering to show users an image of him being killed off. But now the frog is staging a comeback. Next month, the once-ubiquitous amphibian will release a new single – a mash-up of a classic and a more recent song, the details of which the frog’s guardians are keeping under wraps, other than to say that both are popular on TikTok.