Last week, faced with a boy too poorly to do anything but cuddle on the couch, my son’s TV time increased significantly, giving me an all-new insight into what makes him tick in tellyland.
His favourite things are usually loud and brash – nursery rhyme songs, singalongs, and anything involving cartoon ducks or runaway buses. In short, the kind of thing you can watch for about four minutes before you start to feel your brain loosening inside your skull.
With only my son’s intellectual betterment at heart, I decided it would be an opportunity to expand his artistic knowledge with videos of the Beastie Boys and Busta Rhymes, vintage Sesame Street and a few short-lived forays into Hayao Miyazaki. All of which failed spectacularly. He might be too young, or too poorly, to have enjoyed them, but the fact is nothing sustained his attention like his one, true favourite, the stopgap to which I eventually revert, Peppa Pig.
I had known he liked Peppa Pig. Of course he does. The whole world loves Peppa Pig, with her stick-figure limbs and head shaped like a travel hairdryer that’s been flattened by a steamroller. I just hadn’t realised he was so breathlessly addicted that it was the one programme he could watch indefinitely while in the grip of fever. Moreover, after many, many hours, I can now confirm it’s an addiction to which I have myself succumbed.
The show appears to be a gently comic cartoon about an anthropomorphic pig who lives on a hill, surrounded by other anthropomorphic animals who live on neighbouring hills – but it’s altogether more intriguing than that. It is never explained, for example, why some animals get to be ‘people’ and some remain animals. (In the Peppa film, her class even take a trip to the zoo and, well, the less said about that brain-melting melange of animal logic the better.)
Almost every adult in the show is called Daddy or Mummy or Grandad etc, suffixed by whatever animal they happen to be – Daddy Pig, Grandad Dog, Mummy Rabbit. A rare exception is Miss Rabbit, Mummy Rabbit’s identical twin sister who has, for no explained reason, roughly 18 part-time jobs. Are we to detect a critique of late capitalism in the fact that she works as a cashier, librarian, bus driver, helicopter rescue pilot and training co-ordinator for the local fire service? And what kind of zero hours contract is she on that she must also sell ice-cream on the side? I’ve now watched every episode several times and no answers are forthcoming.
My only recourse is to keep watching and hope these mysteries are explained. The risk is that my son will get sick of it before I do, but if he does – tough luck. We’ve gone too far now. Some culture is too important to be misunderstood, and I have only his intellectual betterment at heart.
Follow Séamas on Twitter @shockproofbeats
