I loathe this entitled swine... she is banned in our house
THERE are few television characters ruder, bossier and more infuriating than Peppa Pig. Star of the eponymous children’s series, now a billion-pound global phenomenon, the ghastly pink piggy spends her days putting down her little brother, talking back to her parents, being mean to her friends – and fat-shaming her father.
Even if you can get past that grating, highpitched squeaky voice (and don’t get me started on the snorts), there’s no denying it: Peppa is a spoiled, entitled little brat.
In our house, where my sons aged two and four would love nothing more than to watch back-to-back episodes of the show like all their friends, Peppa Pig is banned.
And though it may sound unnecessarily harsh, there’s method behind the sanction.
To the uninitiated (and oh, how I envy you), Peppa is a four-year-old cartoon farm animal, who lives with her brother George, two, and their parents, in a house on a hill in Peppatown. Yes, already you can see quite how narcissistic the little swine is.
Each five-minute episode follows Peppa, her family and friends doing something mundane: jumping in puddles, going on a train, having a picnic – you get the picture.
When Peppa doesn’t get her way, she sulks. When presented with food she doesn’t like, she says ‘Yuck’. When she loses a game, she has a tantrum. When told off for bad behaviour, she screams: ‘You’re not my friend any more!’
As any parent knows, these are pretty common traits among kids of pre-school age, but are they attributes I want to endorse – or worse, encourage – in my own children? Abso-pigging-lutely not.
It turns out I’m not alone. While many of our under-fives may be hooked on this saccharine dross, American parents have cottoned on to the fact that Peppa is a terrible role model for their offspring. As one mother told the Wall Street Journal this week: ‘Peppa is rude and impatient, and the show teaches kids that this is who she is and that it’s okay.’
Another describes the British cartoon – which turns 20 this year – as ‘deceptive’, adding that the characters are ‘rude and stupid’ with ‘poor values’.
As a case in point, in an episode entitled Whistling, Peppa tries (and fails) to whistle and, on discovering that her friend Suzy Sheep can, cuts her off mid-conversation by hanging up the phone.
SHE then goes outside in a strop and stamps her feet until her mum comes along with a plate of chocolate biscuits. Quite what the moral of this tiresome tale is supposed to be, I don’t know. And poor Suzy Sheep never gets an apology.
In The Tree House, another loathsome episode, Grandpa Pig builds Peppa and George a tree house – and Peppa comes up with a secret phrase you must say to get in.
The password – eye-roll here – is ‘Daddy’s big tummy’. Cue everyone collapsing into snorts at Daddy Pig’s obesity. Except Daddy Pig, of course, who looks deeply upset at being mocked by his entire family.
Peppa herself isn’t the only part of the show that’s come in for criticism, either. Over the years, viewers have accused the cartoon of endorsing gender stereotypes, reflecting a middle-class world view and encouraging children to talk back – not lessons I want blaring from my living-room TV.
In hating Peppa, I realise I’m very much in the minority. There are, to date, 374 episodes of the series, shown in 180 countries.
As the show has ballooned (sorry, Daddy Pig, not a thinly veiled fat joke), so too has its reach: it now garners €1.16billion in global merchandise sales and boasts theme parks as far afield as Shanghai and Hampshire. The brattish, brutish Peppa lumbers on, unstopped and apparently unstoppable.Mercifully, her senseless snorts will never worm their way into my house – and my children are all the better for it.