Peppa Pig such as sadness, happiness, irritation, bewilderment and confusion. Although the main characters - mostly mammals - are anthropomorphic, other animal characters are not, for example, Tiddles the tortoise, Polly Parrot, and the ducks. In addition, the narrator of the series John Sparkes reinforces the action and humour, saying things like "Oh, dear" when something unfortunate happens (such as George starts crying) or "Look out!" when a character is doing something unsafe (such as Peppa riding her bicycle without looking where she's going). The first series of 52 five-minute episodes started on Channel 5 on 31 May 2004, and had its
Peppa Pig in 2015, former UK health minister Norman Lamb said that programmes such as "Peppa Pig" should include gay characters, because having arbitrary boundaries as to what relationships are acceptable in children's television was "not equitable". The "British Medical Journal" carried a light-hearted article in its Christmas 2017 edition, which suggested that although the programme includes numerous "positive public health messages, encouraging healthy eating, exercise, and road safety", it ran the risk of "contributing to unrealistic expectations of primary care" by depicting general practitioner Doctor Brown Bear as making out-of-hours home visits as soon as contacted about apparently trivial illnesses, and