Britain’s great exports once included steel from Sheffield, cotton from Lancashire, ceramics from Staffordshire and ships from the Clyde and Tyne.
As any parent or grandparent will know, their modern equivalent is one Peppa Pig, the cartoon porker whose eponymous TV show graces screens in 118 countries and has earned £6 billion for the UK. Her global dominance of toddlers’ screens is such that theme parks have sprung up in her honour in both China and the US. Not since Beatlemania has Britain exerted such cultural clout.
Now, predictably enough, comes the backlash. At the height of the pandemic, with toddlers shackled to their screens and enthralled by Peppa, US families reported an alarming phenomenon. Children as American as apple pie were speaking of biscuits, petrol stations and tellies, as if they had been reared in the home counties. But this insidious anglicisation does not stop there.
Now, exhausted parents from all corners of the US have complained to The Wall Street Journal that the impudent little Peppa, never slow to express her displeasure, is turning their offspring into Brit brats. “Peppa is rude and impatient,” moaned Kayla Tychsen of Houston. “The show teaches kids that this is who she is and that it’s OK.”
Like the solemn evangelicals who burnt Beatles LPs in the 1960s, some American —and Canadian — parents have resorted to boycotts. “We don’t need her nasty behaviours in our house,” fumed Melissa McIntosh from Ontario.
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They are not wrong. Peppa bullies her brother and is decidedly unsympathetic to her hapless father’s all-too-relatable struggles to tame his bulging belly. She is bossy, demanding and prone to unpredictable fits of pique. Not at all the saccharin heroine of white picket fence lore. But for British parents long forced to endure gangster rap and other atrocities, revenge is sweet.
