The mighty power of Peppa….

With an almost crushing inevitability, the child has discovered the phenomenon that is Peppa Pig – and like most small people of her age, she loves it. Well come on, who wouldn’t? As silly as it appears it’s a gleefully subversive show that quite happily takes on such issues as the battle of the sexes (check out the Mothers Fire Brigade meeting episode for further proof), our ever expanding waistlines and our fascination with must-have gadgets (when was the last time you saw a Sat Nav mentioned in a show for the under-fives? Well when was it??????) There’s even an episode called Picnic, although I have to admit I was somewhat disappointed when I tuned in and discovered it had nothing to do with French New Wave cinema.

But anyway…..the upshot of this new found Peppa devotion was that the child and I decided we just had to add a DVD of porcine antics to our ever expanding collection (since it is a sad but true fact that the DVD player is now dominated by the likes of Gigglebiz, Charlie and Lola and various Disney classics featuring sweet-faced princesses, while my decidedly child-unfriendly copies of Heathers, Clerks and the like have been relegated to the bedroom shelf and may get watched again some time around 2024…..). But what the heck. It’s the time of year for presents and I figured Peppa had to be among them.

So it was that the DVD was purchased – and somehow I had managed to snap up one which had most of the episodes we had recently seen on Milkshake. So we put it on and watched it. And watched it again. And again. And again. And again. And indeed, again, until I knew all of the scripts off by heart and was having to push my eyeballs back into the sockets with the sheer effort of watching it so many times. I estimate we must have watched it at least four thousand times in the first 48 hours of having it, leaving me to wonder whether there is a word for someone who has to sit through ‘Daddy Loses His Glasses’ on a loop. Unfortunate, perhaps. Just to make it even more fun, the child found a certain moment in said episode funny and then insisted on watching that microsecond over and over and over and over again, presumably just to test my endurance. This particular habit could prove interesting when we take her on her first cinema outing, to see The Princess And The Frog, in a couple of months time. I am currently in the process of explaining that the nice cinema man won’t run the same bit of the film over and over again for her and she’ll just have to sit nicely and watch the whole thing like all the other children.

But as I was being subjected to this home entertainment form of Chinese water torture, it suddenly occurred to me that this is presumably how children’s DVDs rack up sales in the first place. It’s an interesting method – the parent, driven to distraction with repeated viewings of the same Peppa/Thomas/Balamory/Waybuloo DVD, thinks to themselves ‘oh for God’s SAKE, let’s just go and buy another one so I don’t have to sit through this all over again!’ Thus the cycle is complete. And this would also explain how we ended up with the whole of the first two series of Charlie and Lola on DVD – could it be that the child made me watch This Is Actually My Party so often that I was compelled to rush to HMV and buy another one (while at the same time thinking ‘oh what the hell, they’re only a fiver?’) Er, quite possibly.

Still, I suppose I’ll have the chance to get my own back when she is older and can watch some of my films – some long ones with subtitles should do for starters. In the mean time I’m off to see whether Daddy Pig has found his glasses yet. Bet they’ll be in his armchair…..

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