Peppa Pig

Channel: Channel 5/ Nick Jr

Running Time: 5 mins (ish)

Date: 2004 - present

I have the most amazing pulled pork recipe, if anyone's interested. 

Premise:
***WARNING: THE FOLLOWING CONTAINS PUNS THAT HAVE NOT BEEN PASSED COMPLETELY SAFE FOR HUMAN CONSUMPTION***

Peppa is a young, animated, anthropomorphic pig who lives in a house with her mother and father, and her infant brother George. They live in a house at the top of an unrealistically steep hill, and have adventures of the sort that are kind of low-key in the same way as Bing, but without the downright-weird Flop element (If that sentence confuses you, head here).

Peppa and her family talk in English, but incorporate little snorts here and there to remind you that they’re actually pigs, unless you’d forgotten. They visit their grandparents, jump in puddles, ride bikes, go to the shops, pour-cups of tea, and generally live an idyllic piggy life (but if George goes missing, Peppa will do anything to get the baby back - and shoulder the blame herself). The sense of humour is pretty obvious; there are plenty of voice actors willing to ham it up. On the hoof, sometimes. You know, ad hock.

They are friends with other groups of animals, such as the rabbits, the dogs, the ponies, the zebras - the kinds of animals you see out and about everyday anyway. But what do you care? S’nowt to do with you. The original premise had most episodes set at their beach house near Copenhagen, but unfortunately they were duped by property scammers, and the incident was popularly known as the Danish Bay Con (I’ll stop now, but you’d have loved my reference to the numerous copies of A Doll’s House they have lying around the place. Oh, go on then. The spare-Ibsen).

Henrik Ibsen: clearly a fan of chops. It is unclear how he felt about his name being used for third-rate puns. 

Peppa and her family appear live a life beyond free-range; despite this, their diet - especially Daddy Pig’s - is very unhealthy, and could invalidate any future claims that the future Peppacorn Sausages Range are organic.

Background: With their first foray into children’s television, The Big Knights, disappointingly treated by the BBC, the trio of friends Phil Davies, Mark Astley and Neville Astley said they would, in future, seek other outlets for their work. And this is why Peppa Pig isn’t a CBeebies programme, as it feels like it should be. Funded in part by Nick Jr and a lot by themselves, it appears that our three musketeers were very confident in themselves that they were on to a winner. Even though it seems ridiculous to look back on, back in the early part of the century a lot of children’s TV was dominated by male characters - Bob the Builder, Fireman Sam, Postman Pat. The idea of a female lead was a bit of a novel one. Our trio also knew that the way to big money was through the spin-offs and the merch - not the show itself. However, this extremely thorough and very interesting article from the FT in 2010, cite the 3 millionth DVD sale in that year - “at £10 a DVD, that’s quite a lot”, says Phil Davies, freshly returned from three months in the Maldives at that point, where clearly he had spent time brushing up on his maths. Although I’m personally not a massive fan of ostentatious wealth (unless it’s mine), these three gents seem to have taken an enormous risk with their own money, succeeded massively, and managed not to do it by selling arms or vlogging, and that is worth a lot of respect.

Co-creator Phil Davies describes himself as owning "a fancy car". See if you can guess how he affords it. 

For a seemingly innocuous programme, Peppa Pig really has caused a lot of controversy over the years. Peppa was a promotional figure for the Sure Start programme launched by the 1997-2010 Labour government, and confirmed that she would not be attending the launch of the party’s 2010 families manifesto ‘in the interests of avoiding any controversy or misunderstanding’, just in case anyone was more likely to vote for (or against) Labour on the basis that a fictional pig was in a photo op.

There were complaints, and subsequent retrospective animation, to include seat belts to the characters whilst in transit, which had been missed off as an oversight on the first couple of series, as were bicycle helmets. And, in 2012, the episode ‘Mr Skinnylegs’ was banned from broadcast in Australia after complaints were received about the sentiment that ‘spiders were not to be feared’.

(Hopefully) not an Australian spider. 

The most bizzare of these sideshows, and most open to deliberate misinterpretation by The Daily Mail click-bait hacks occured when Norman Lamb, Liberal Democrat leadership hopeful (four words which are increasingly funny when seen together in the same sentence), stated that children’s TV should include homosexual characters, as it was representative of modern society, and to exclude gay characters from children’s TV would suggest there is a limit to gay rights. When asked if there should be gay characters on Peppa Pig, he said it should not be “out of bounds… which it appears to be at the moment”. Of course, this was twisted deliberately by the tabloids, not least in the Mail headline “It’s time for a LESBIAN Peppa Pig”, which is not at all what Lamb was saying, but hey, clicks.

Entertainment: A strong one from both parent and child perspectives. The voice acting - particularly from Daddy Pig (Richard Ridings) and the narrator (John Sparkes) stand out as charming and earnest, and the children are not bad either. The stories never achieve the levels of tweeness and saccharine that Bing and Topsy and Tim aspire to - there is a sense of fun embedded in each episode, and ‘learning’ is thankfully given a back seat (in a seat belt, one hopes) to the silliness, tomfoolery, and downright nincompoopery of the script. The episodes are nice and bitesize for our toddler, and one blends into the other quite seamlessly for a good Amazon Prime bingewatch.

Ratings:

Sex: Given that a typical litter of (domesticated) pigs ranges from 5-25 piglets (averaging 10-12), it appears that Mummy and Daddy Pig either ate all the other pigs in each litter that produced Peppa and George, or Daddy Pig’s much commented-upon obesity has affected his fertility, his sex drive, or both. (1/10)

Music: The theme tune is catchy without being too intrusive; there is a nice, brassy, oompah-oompah feel to it, which is tonally consistent with the rest of the show. Although I’ve heard numerous complaints about earworm, this is much less annoying than Raa-Raa. (7/10)

Plausibility: Many obstacles here, the pig thing being the most obvious. Although the steepness of the hill upon which Peppa’s house is built is an obvious starting point for pedants, it should be noted that a) Daddy Pig works as a architectural engineer and should know his stuff, b) the structural integrity of the house has (as of writing) yet to be featured in the plot, and c) the writers wanted it that way, to match the way in which children draw their own houses. And, more importantly, Mark Baker notes: “Well, it’s just that having a huge hill like that is so funny. And ridiculous – that every time Peppa and George run out to play, they have to run down this very, very steep hill. It is optimistic, and fun.” An optimistically steep hill. There you go. (5/10)

House/ pigs not drawn to scale. 

Education: Some important messages about family unity and inter-sibling co-operation are established early, and maintained throughout. Children are certainly not being stretched in terms of how different kinds of families are presented - this setup is strictly nuclear and traditional. Whilst this is fine on its own terms, it will be interesting to see when children’s - especially pre-schoolers’ - television presents a non-traditional family unit and doesn’t make a big deal about it.

Daddy Pig is perhaps the true hero of the show in that he never lets embarrassment or failure get in the way of his cheery demeanour, which is a good lesson for adults, if not the target audience. (8/10)

Overall: A triumph of pre-school schedules - this is not quite in the same vein as the all-time classics of Teletubbies, In The Night Garden and Thomas the Tank Engine, but I reckon if you ask a five year old they’d likely disagree. Peppa isn’t going anywhere soon, unless there is a nuclear holocaust, in which case her isolated, unsheltered hill-top dwelling is likely to be among the first casualties of the blast. I found Peppa the more charming the more I wrote about her, and even though I’d eat a chorizo sausage made out of her, I’d feel slightly sad about it.

Well worth including as part of a diverse televisual portfolio. (8/10).

Catch up on any missed blogs here, including The Furchester Hotel, Bing, In the Night Garden, Teletubbies, and Postman Pat SDS.