Many Peppa Pig fans conclude that Daddy Pig looks a bit like their own father

“Yes,” I tell her blankly, “I know. Isn’t that useful?”

“Like Daddy Pig,” she continues, “you have a big belly like Daddy Pig.”

Relating this story to fellow dads this week, I’ve received identical stories from every single one, many of them identical to stories we’ve shared before, when our eldest kids were themselves three-year-olds. It may be the lot of every dad in the Anglophone world to, one day, find their belly twanged or bopped, and compared to that of every toddler’s favourite porcine patriarch. Despite this, in all my time writing this column, I have maintained a dignified silence on the subject of Daddy Pig. This is mostly because digging around in Peppa Pig’s messaging seems like the sort of thing I’d have been asked to do by a soon-to-be-doomed culture website in 2012. Any time I’ve obsessed about a cartoon, I swear it was only because I hated it so much I could simply resist the urge no longer. For this reason, I shall let my lengthy diatribes against Paw Patrol and Morphle stand proudly on my record.

Peppa Pig, by contrast, is a show I quite like. While it never hits the heights of Hey Duggee, much less Bluey – the single best show on television – it has heart and charm and a pleasingly subliminal line in observational humour. That said, in 2025 it does seem odd that Peppa’s teasing about Daddy Pig’s weight is never meaningfully countered by any other character in a show aimed at toddlers, at the precise stage when our inducements not to mock or make fun of people for things like their weight, are most voluble.

If I find it mildly problematic – and, occasionally, personally inconvenient – many others have spent the past decade being fully scandalised. To outline the broadest silhouette of their thesis, some online dads – the kind whose avatars on X depict them wearing sunglasses in cars – take supreme offence at Peppa’s father being depicted as a corpulent, feckless moron.

As for the charge that he’s often described as being fat, this is, frankly, inarguable, even if one might feel the need to remind viewers that Peppa’s family are, well, pigs; a fact that seems frequently forgotten, despite their surname and the fact that every single episode ends with them rolling around in the mud while snorting.

It’s Daddy Pig’s status as an incompetent, however, which is arguably more incendiary. His refrain “I’m a bit of an expert” generally tends to presage a spectacular failure to operate effectively in whatever area he has just claimed expertise. You might counter that he is, in every sense, a crudely drawn character, one whose flaws are presented for comic effect, but to the show’s detractors this is evidence of a deep-seated anti-male prejudice that’s warping our children’s brains.

To give that line of thinking a tiny bit more credit, it’s not so long since the trope of the “useless man” was, indeed, a scourge on our airways. At the turn of this new century, it seemed that almost every sitcom and advertisement depicted men as schlubby incompetents just waiting to be shown how to do things, usually by the long-suffering, competent and beautiful women in their lives, a sort-of Homer Simpson/Men Behaving Badly hangover that lasted well into Cameron’s Britain. This was not merely tedious and infantilising for men, it – crucially – had the side effect of letting men off the hook for being lazy, childish boors; codifying their uselessness as normal because, well, that’s just what we’re all like.

It’s just that I don’t feel like this applies to Daddy Pig, who may be slightly overconfident but is also a warm, caring and attentive father, beloved by his family and seemingly everyone who lives within the topographically demented hills of Peppatown. He’s also a civil engineer, like my own dad, so maybe I’m drawn to forgive warm, caring fathers their foibles if they include the sort of overconfidence which once led my dad to proclaim he “could speak most European languages at a push”, because he’d learned Greek and Latin in school. At a certain point, neuroses about fictional characters are likely to be grounded not in those parts one finds inaccurate, but those one sees as cringingly familiar.

I’d rather Daddy Pig’s weight were less often a butt of jokes, and doubt if the show were being made from scratch today that this aspect of his character would be retained. But as a silly, overconfident man myself, standing in my bathroom with my daughter’s head laughing on my belly, I can think of worse people, or pigs, to be compared to.