Peppa Pig has introduced the first female same-sex couple to its cast of characters.
During Tuesday’s episode (6 September) of the kids’ TV show, which was titled “Families”, Peppa’s friend Penny Polar Bear introduced the title character to her two mums.
While drawing a portrait of her family, Penny explained: “I live with my mummy and my other mummy. One mummy is a doctor and one mummy cooks spaghetti.”
It is the first time a lesbian couple has featured on the children’s show, which airs on Channel 5 in the UK.
Peppa Pig first aired in 2004 and has become a huge international hit, broadcasting in 180 countries around the world.
Last year, a Wall Street Journal article reported on a phenomenon that it dubbed “the Peppa effect”, where American kids watching Peppa Pig during the pandemic had begun adopting English accents and changing American-English phrases to British ones.
One mother from California recalled her child speaking to her in a British accent, with her daughter asking: “Mummy, are you going to the optician?”
In 2020, a study into violence in animated children’s shows found that the British pre-school series featured “shocking” levels of violence.
One of the study’s researchers, Bath University’s Dr Abbie Jordan, said of the findings: “These programmes could do much more to help by modelling it in different ways and crucially by showing more empathy when characters experience pain.”
