Peppa is a pig with a head the shape of a hairdryer who lives in a house on a hill. All the houses in Peppa Pig are on their own hills, which appears to place us in a Thatcherite world of atomised populations, or even American-style survivalism. Yet Peppa's society is both strikingly multicultural – to be precise, multispecies no less – and remarkably homogenous.
Take for instance education, as seen in the playgroup run by Madame Gazelle. Twelve species are represented among the fifteen students, with three younger siblings – Peppa's brother George Pig, together with Edmond Elephant and Richard Rabbit – making up the total. Given this level of diversity, which would present a challenge in a contemporary inner-London primary school, there is notably little interspecies friction on display.
This achievement is all the more impressive when we take into account the dire underfunding of education in this community. George, who turns two in Series Two, attends the same class as Peppa, who turned four in Series One. There seems to be no account taken of age-appropriate activities, or separate playtimes for toddlers and pre-schoolers. Madame Gazelle is the sole teacher, and when a hole appears in the roof, rather than appeal to the education authority for emergency funds she makes the children hand over their toys for a jumble sale – where they buy them back again with their pocket money.
If educational provision is hit and miss, healthcare appears to be spectacularly well funded. The Pig family is registered with Dr. Brown Bear, a single-handed general practitioner who clearly has an easily manageable list. This model physician gives his patients his direct line and answers his phone expeditiously. Upon hearing of the mildest ailment – a slightly sore throat, or a playground scrape – he sets off on a home visit no matter the hour, invariably making a second call later the same day. This lavish provision (which, since we see no money or paperwork change hands, presumably takes the form of single-payer socialised medicine) prompted a recent contributor to the British Medical Journal to worry that the series was encouraging unrealistic expectations of primary care.
These things matter, because Peppa Pig and her clan may well be Britain's most influential family. Her show is broadcast in more than 180 territories, and has recently become famous for its popularity in China. So, taking our cue from Flaubert's (admittedly satirical) Dictionary of Received Ideas and Raymond Williams's Keywords of modern culture and society, let us attempt to identify the organising concepts of Peppa's world, trace how they came about, and ask what meaning they hold.
We have already seen that species equality is an accepted norm in Peppa's neighbourhood, regardless of whether the species has light, dark or (in the case of the Zebra family) striped skin. Social provision, albeit patchy, is another sign of a progressive society. In contrast, the class system appears to be a hangover from a less egalitarian era.
Although no one is so impolite as to say so, the viewer soon becomes aware that Mummy Pig has married down. Her parents, Granny and Grandpa Pig, are empty-nesters who live in a large house with extensive orchards. Grandpa Pig maintains a motor boat which is big enough to take Granny, George, Peppa and all her friends on a trip to Pirate Island. Both Granny and Grandpa speak with a noticeably plummy accent, a tell-tale sign of upper-middle-class status. In her manner and choice of hats, Granny Pig even bears a passing resemblance to the late Queen Mother. It's true that Grandpa Pig's very best friend, with whom he carries on a relentless rivalry, is Granddad Dog, who is a mechanic. This indication of social mobility is, however, undermined by Grandpa Pig's habit of talking down to his friend, and worse, to his own son-in-law.
Daddy Pig's accent identifies his background as lower middle class. He works as an architect – a respectable profession if there ever was one – which seems a signal achievement for a pig. Yet his skeleton staff and ample spare time suggest that his may not be a busy practice. His old-model car and decrepit armchair – sourced, we learn, from a rubbish tip – seem to confirm that he is a pig of limited means.
Daddy Pig may of course simply be a keen recycler, and Mummy Pig may well be a homeworker by choice. Her work, though unspecified, is said to be important; in the first series we see Daddy Pig making soup while she types away on her keyboard. Children and homeworking do not always mix, as I can attest from personal experience, and more than once Peppa and George crash the computer or delete a file while playing. Mummy Pig remains impassive, if tight lipped, but occasionally she lets slip a hint of repressed resentment. One day when the Pig family is watching television, the queen appears on screen to announce an award for the hardest-working person in the country. "I wonder who that will be," muses Daddy Pig. "It certainly won't be you, darling," retorts Mummy Pig in a flash, her tone noticeably tart.
Any viewer will instantly guess the recipient's identity. Miss Rabbit is a remarkable leporid who earns the Queen's Award for Industry for her work running an ice cream stall, recycling centre, and library; driving a train and fire engine; piloting a rescue helicopter; and working the supermarket checkout. That list, improbable though it is, barely begins to plumb her talents. A versatile entrepreneur, Miss Rabbit is the owner of a shoe shop, china shop, gift shop, smoothie bar and Hall of Mirrors, as well as the operator of a kiosk at the Mountain Beauty Spot and the Hook-a-Duck attraction at the funfair. She sells Christmas trees and tickets to Duckland, hires ice skates and skis, and moonlights as an airport check-in clerk and cabin attendant. At the aquarium and museum she acts as ticket seller, caretaker, waitress and gift shop assistant. She appears to be both a qualified nurse and dental nurse. In the episode "Golden Boots," we even see her running a gift shop on the moon.
Is this unequal division of labour evidence of gross exploitation that warrants working hours legislation, or feminism in action? On occasion Miss Rabbit does look a touch harried. Yet in her matter-of-fact, mildly sardonic ubiquity, she clearly represents a modern female superrabbit.
Even more than class, gender is a key underlying concept in Peppa Pig, for we appear to be in a world where traditional gender roles have radically reversed. In stark contrast to Miss Rabbit, Daddy Pig is lazy, out of shape and hopeless at nearly everything. He can't read a map, or work out what the buttons on a car do. He loses at draughts to his toddler son and is scared of wasps. When he tries to get fit, he rides Peppa's bike into the duck pond. When he tries to find his way in the fog, he walks into the duck pond. When he flips a pancake, it sticks to the ceiling; when Mummy Pig loosens it by jumping upstairs with her children, it falls on his face. And when he finally builds a house on the next hill, he sells it to a family of wolves, who are well known for wreaking havoc with pigs' dwellings.
To be fair, Daddy Pig is not entirely useless. He may be a bumbling fool, but he's also a gentle tower of strength. He is a hands-on modern father who always has time and never a cross word for his children. He's warm and kind and has a chivalric streak, seen when he prepares Mummy Pig breakfast in bed on her birthday. He makes decent balloon animals and possesses basic survival skills, such as starting a campfire with sticks. In his youth he was surprisingly adept at ballet and is still an accomplished diver, who can save the day by retrieving George's watering can from the bottom of the pool.
Yet he always overreaches. "I am the DIY expert of the house," he pompously boasts, which given that he's an architect, his wife works with computers, and his children are children seems a fair bet. Yet he is incapable of putting up a straight shelf or assembling a flat-pack cupboard. In "Daddy Puts up a Picture" he nearly destroys the house while trying to bang a nail in a wall. He then reveals that he does, in fact, possess sufficient skills as a bricklayer, plasterer and decorator to hide the evidence before Mummy Pig comes home – even though he forgets to hang the picture. So why does he constantly fail to deliver the goods?
The reason is that Daddy Pig's worst quality is not incompetence but hubris. He represents men who claim to be able to do it all and, as Mummy Pig archly puts it, get grumpy when they’re caught out. "It's impossible," he proclaims when confronted with an intractable problem like squeaky bike wheels. "It's nonsense," he pronounces when he reads something he can't understand. And someone, usually a female character, takes over and sorts it all out.
Hubris is a quality that rightly invites ridicule, and Daddy Pig gets plenty of it. In "At the Beach," his children use his tummy as a lilo, then bury him in the sand and forget him when they leave for home. In "Thunderstorm," he gets soaking wet – having insisted it won't rain – only to find that the others are more worried about a soggy teddy. "Silly daddy," says Peppa every time he gets something wrong. "Naughty daddy," she says in "Daddy Gets Fit" when she orders him to do a hundred press-ups and catches him counting loudly while watching TV.
Daddy Pig's tummy is the primary vehicle of his humiliation. A rotund belly seems a fine thing in a porker, but Peppa is forever accusing her father of getting fatter. "Daddy's tummy has grown," she says. "My tummy is not big," he protests at a picnic, then stuffs himself and falls asleep, snoring. In "Puppet Show," he and his brother both stuff themselves and fall asleep, snoring. The password to enter Peppa's hideaway in "The Tree House" is "Daddy's big tummy," words which he is humiliatingly forced to repeat to be allowed through the door – though his tummy proves too big and he has to take the roof off instead.
This is fattist and seems unkind, but perhaps isn’t intended to be. My own six-year-old son is unaccountably obsessed with my tummy, which he appears to think is pleasingly bouncy and is halfway proud of. Like everything in Peppa's world, tummies are seen from a child's perspective. Even the smallest belly seems a thing of fascination for rawboned growing kids. Though hang on a minute – how do I know that my son's abdominal obsession doesn't stem from watching Peppa Pig?
Emerging from our semantic bubble for a second, let's admit that Daddy Pig is a brilliant comic creation. And as with every great comic creation, he teaches us something serious. This long-suffering porcine character reminds us that we dads have to own up to our failings and limitations; that it's okay to fail, so long as we have the ability to chuckle merrily at ourselves and bounce back up without brooding. It's a valuable lesson for kids and grown-ups alike.
We might even go further and propose Daddy Pig as a model of an awkward but socially responsible masculinity. He is after all utterly harmless; even his silliest schemes rebound on no-one but himself. He may seem hapless next to more traditional male animals such as Mr. Zebra, the postman, and Mr. Bull, who is variously a construction worker, garbage collector, and nurse. Yet in Peppa Pig, male efficiency produces worse results than male incompetence. When Daddy Pig drops his keys down the drain at a mountain beauty spot, Mr. Bull arrives with his bulldozers and road crew and digs up the entire tourist attraction. In another episode, the daddies start a blazing fire while trying to light a barbeque and the mummies have to put it out. The clear inference is that testosterone is destroying the planet: as Miss Rabbit's all-female fire-fighters chorus, "Mummies to the rescue!"
Well-intentioned it may be, but the series' obsession with male failings has drawn the ire of conservative pundits from Britain to Australia, who have blasted it as an insidious left-wing plot to indoctrinate children against masculinity. Several have accused the series' creators of anti-male sexism, which, given that they are male, presumably makes them gender traitors. (In an interview, they insisted that they simply felt more comfortable poking fun at their own kind.) It's a mark of Peppa Pig's popularity and cultural significance that it stands accused of somethings as serious as warping the way impressionable growing young minds see their fathers.
The same critics who denounce the series for being hard on Daddy Pig also lambast it for being soft on childrearing. These are, after all, parents so doting that Mummy lets Peppa wear her new red shoes in the bath and to bed, while Daddy doesn’t so much as murmur when Peppa destroys his prize pumpkin. One contributor to the Daily Mail, a right-wing British tabloid, breathlessly accused Peppa of being a spoiled brat. "She stamps her feet," he thundered, "bullies her brother, makes fun of her parents, falls out with her friends, whinges when she loses, pokes out her tongue and generally displays copious amounts of antisocial behaviour… Why are we Brits so intent on creating anti-role models for our kids?"
As a parent, I'm tempted to respond with a good long snort. Children identify with Peppa's world because it's presented from a child's point of view, though like all the best cartoons, it offers plenty of wry observations that appeal to adults as well. Pigs sometimes belch, and children sometimes behave badly and hope to get away with it. Like many children's stories, Peppa Pig lets them test the limits without getting in trouble.
Peppa's defenders have rebutted her critics by arguing that the series is post-feminist: that it marks a shift in gender norms from the era when Sesame Street featured almost exclusively male puppets to one in which a female piglet can be the main character of an international hit show. That may be true of Peppa, though if my son's recent question about why she had to be female is anything to go by, her work may not be done. It fails to account for the relative roles of Daddy Pig and Miss Rabbit. True post-feminism would presumably mean being equally comfortable with a series in which women were fat and boastful and men fitter and smarter. We're still in the corrective phrase of this revolution.
A better answer to the naysayers is that far from being radical, like most children's entertainment Peppa Pig is at heart pretty conservative. Peppa likes butterflies and dressing up as a fairy princess. George is obsessed to the point of monomania with his dinosaur. Male uselessness may still be controversial when presented to kids, but it's also a comedy cliché. The series is also stoutly pro-monarchy. Miss Rabbit is apparently such a fan of royalty that she faints when she meets the queen, who comes across as a kind granny who likes knitting and isn't above driving a tour bus. The queen has the distinction of being the only human in the series; even the animal keepers in the zoo are other animals. Perhaps it would have been a step too far to depict her as a lion, or sheep.
In its balance of liberalism and conservatism, Peppa Pig is rather a good approximation of British society. On a good day, to be sure: the sun shines a bit too much, and the population's behaviour is a bit too sunny, too. Yet like Peppa's world, today's Britain is a place where men think they're in charge and say so loudly, while women run the show. We prize our National Health Service more than we do our state education system. We increasingly worry about the environment. We mostly like the monarchy, though we make fun of it. We are still more obsessed with class than we realise, but also more accepting of multiculturalism than many think – trends that converged in the jubilation over the wedding of Prince Harry and Meghan Markle, a divorced mixed-race immigrant. And as one Conservative recently noted of his pro-Brexit colleagues, our politicians sometimes act like toddlers – not unlike Grandpa Pig and Granddad Dog trading insults: "You old sea dog!" "Water hog!"
Children's stories are powerful cultural signifiers because they induct new generations into the social code of their time. The ideologies of race, gender and class they present are necessarily mainstream, because they need to be broadly accepted as giving children the tools to navigate their world. Deviate too far left or right, and they stand accused of indoctrination. At the same time, by using distancing techniques like anthropomorphism they can nudge us into recognising uncomfortable truths about ourselves.
Last time British pigs were so famous was in George Orwell's Animal Farm. Orwell's satirical novel was written for adults, but I grew up in an age when totalitarianism was a live threat and I was set to read it at school, when I was about ten years old. In Animal Farm, Napoleon and his fellow pigs take over the farm only to become oppressive rulers over the other animals, until they closely resemble their former human masters. "The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again," wrote Orwell in the novel's concluding sentence; "but already it was impossible to say which was which."
Sometimes it's hard to tell the pigs in Peppa Pig from people, too, but not because they've attempted to create a revolutionary new society only to lapse into the bad old ways. We are fortunate to live in Peppa's world and not Napoleon's. Hers is a world where solidarity between species flourishes, and no one wants the whip hand. Its pigs may walk on hind legs, but their key traits are kindness, tolerance, scepticism, a gruff good humour, and the ability to fall over laughing on a regular basis.
Peppa Pig may be literally one-dimensional, but in an age of Brexit and populism, scapegoating and unneighbourliness, it laughingly reminds us of the most important concept of all: our shared humanity. Its message is simple. There's nothing that can't be solved by a good snort and a wallow in that great democratic leveller, the dirt we all come from. People may have their differences, and sometimes drive each other crazy, but everyone loves jumping in muddy puddles.
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