Why Percy gets our hogs and kisses!
Outside many a butcher’s shop, you can still find a model of a grinning pig, on its hind legs, often dressed in a butcher’s apron, merrily brandishing a knife and fork.
Call me over-sensitive, but i’ve always found these models particularly creepy. Would any pig in its right mind be quite so happy to participate in its own consumption?
in our over-sensitive times, you would think tucking into food items with cheery faces would have gone out of fashion. But no: it seems that nowadays we all want to tuck into any cake that looks like a cross between a human and an animal.
it all started with Marks & spencer, who successfully marketed a Percy Pig line of confectionery, culminating in their current Valentine’s day gift, ‘Percy Pig Hogs and Kisses’. this consists of Percy Pig hugging Penny Pig, who is naked but for a yellow flower behind one ear. Both of them are beaming. don’t they know they’re made of chocolate and are about to be eaten?
Before the Percy Pig range came M&s’s creation of Colin the Caterpillar, which was basically a swiss roll with a goofy Henry the Hoover face shoved on at one end. soon after, they added Colin’s girlfriend, Connie the Caterpillar. sales now amount to 15 million.
soon, all the other supermarkets were following suit, leading to cakey caterpillar wars.
to the untrained eye, they all look much the same but each supermarket has given its caterpillar a different name. the most off-putting is sainsbury’s Wiggles, which makes it sound as if the poor thing is alive and kicking, so that anyone eating it will be enduring a Bush tucker trial.
tesco’s caterpillar is called Curly. its face is bright orange, and has a ‘hey-ho’ expression, suggesting he is resigned to its fate. Curly also has a brother called Carl, who is gluten-free. His face is wreathed in an optimistic smile, suggesting it is both happier than Curly and also more stupid.
ever-keen to seem a cut-above, Waitrose gives its caterpillar — at £7, a pound more expensive than most of the others — the name Cecil. Oddly enough, Cecil looks a bit like Ann Widdecombe, with an unforgiving hair-do, but thankfully doesn’t come with added opinions. Morrison’s caterpillar, unimaginatively called Morris, has eyes too close together, and no mouth to speak of.
Like all the others, it has a meagre six feet rather than the conventional one hundred. Asda’s Clyde the Caterpillar has a green face, a bright red nose and huge orange bovver boots.
the two remaining caterpillars have famously been at war for nearly a year: Colin the Caterpillar from M&s, and Cuthbert the Caterpillar from Aldi.
Last April, M&s launched a lawsuit against Aldi, saying that Cuthbert was a copy-cat of Colin. Aldi responded by tweaking Cuthbert’s face to make it look less like Colin’s, but M&s remained unimpressed. since February of last year, Cuthbert has been nowhere to be seen.
the two sides have now reached some sort of secret deal. M&s say, ‘the objective of the claim was to protect the intellectual property in our Colin the Caterpillar cake and we are very pleased with the outcome.’
But Aldi also claim to be delighted. some say that they have simply agreed to change Cuthbert’s eyes from brown to white. ‘Cuthbert is free and looking forward to seeing all his fans again very soon,’ says a spokesman.
in this case, ‘seeing’ is just a clumsy euphemism for ‘eaten by’.
Of course, no news story these days is ever entirely free of Boris. in this instance, downing street know-alls have claimed that the cake which ‘ambushed’ Boris at his forbidden birthday party on June 19, 2020, was none other than ... Colin the Caterpillar.
NO doubt sue Gray and Cressida dick each sought an interview with Colin the Caterpillar, as either witness or suspect. But it was not to be. eighteen months on, Colin had disappeared, believed eaten.
Or was it a case of mistaken identity? even in this digital age, police photofits are notoriously inexact, with everyone looking like Liam Gallagher.
Perhaps the guilty party was not Colin at all, but Cuthbert or Morris or Clyde or Curly or Cecil or Carl or Connie, or even the unfortunate Wiggles. Without a more robust inquiry, i fear we shall never know.