Making the day-to-day important: Peppa Pig

When it comes to TV shows, Helena goes through phases.  One month, all she wants to watch is Pocoyó.  The next month, it is wall to wall Fishtronaut.  For the last month, she wants to see the English series Peppa Pig all the time.  If you haven't seen the program, here's a quick clip to give you an idea:



Though all of the characters are animals, they live the lives of middle and lower class Brits -- or at least some imaginary variation on that life -- with plots based on getting sick, the consequences of putting a red shirt in the white laundry, or playing in the park.  Far from the American tradition of superhero cartoons, where every episode is a new threat to the existence of the world, the show just focusses on the quotidian, the day to day life of a relatively happy family.

In fact, Peppa Pig feels less like narrative, and more like a transposition of play to the TV screen.  When Helena and her friends get together, they play house or school or maybe "going to the park"; when she plays alone with her stuffed animals, they often do the same thing, with the hippo becoming "mommy" and the giraffe and wolf as her children.  Where most adult narratives, plays, and movies gain their caché by portraying things that are out of the ordinary -- a murder detective, a woman on the edge of a nervous breakdown, a solider on a distant planet -- both Helena's play and Peppa represent the normal stuff of everyday life.

The TV screen, like the frame of a picture, is a way to draw attention to a particular part of the world.  "This," we learn, "is something to which we should pay attention."  Medieval and renaissance artists put frames around religious paintings, while later on kings and grandees got their images framed.  Today the TV tells us what news matters, that police officers and doctors live the most interesting lives....  In the end, we often feel that our own little lives aren't that important, that our little struggles and joys don't merit a place on a stage.  Nietzsche called this way of looking at the world "life-denying", as if what really mattered was always elsewhere.

Peppa and little kids' play take exactly the opposite tack: they put the frame around the "nothing" of everyday life and say that it does matter.  This works for little children, I think, because for them the world is still so new.  The discipline of school, the power relations of family, the novelty of a new bug found in the park... in some way, they have to ingest all of these ideas and make them homely, comprehensible.  The strange becomes normative and normal.  There are problems with this perspective, of course -- I think of the kids I work with in slums or in the Amazon, for whom Peppa's normalization of British life means a negation of their own day-to-day reality -- but for Helena, the program is fantastic.