Why searching for the cast of baby reindeer will ruin your evening

It was 5:17 AM on a Tuesday, an hour that shouldn't legally exist, and my living room looked like a crime scene involving a half-eaten box of oat biscuits and an aggressively smeared syringe of sticky, strawberry-flavoured Calpol. Florence, the twin who requires deep emotional validation every time she drops a piece of lint, was currently vibrating with rage because her left sock was "looking at her funny." Matilda, the pragmatic twin, was quietly sitting in the corner trying to eat a 10-pence coin she’d excavated from the sofa cushions. I was operating on perhaps three hours of broken sleep, wearing a dressing gown that I’m fairly certain smelled faintly of sour milk and quiet despair.

In a moment of pure, unfiltered desperation to stop the screaming before the neighbours called social services, I reached for the television remote. My sleep-deprived brain formed a single, supposedly foolproof plan: find a video of a cute, seasonal animal. A tiny reindeer. Children love reindeer, right? They’re essentially just woodland horses with built-in coat racks. I brought up the search bar on the smart TV and, with clumsy thumbs, typed in "baby reindeer."

A thumbnail popped up. It looked vaguely moody, but modern television for children is inexplicably moody these days (have you seen the lighting in some of those computer-animated farm shows? It’s like a Scandinavian noir). I hovered over the play button, assuming it was some sort of heartwarming documentary or perhaps an animated special. I pulled out my phone just to double-check the voice actors, fully expecting the cast of baby reindeer to feature James Corden voicing a sassy caribou who learns the true meaning of friendship through a choreographed hip-hop routine. I was entirely prepared to be annoyed by Corden’s inevitable singing. I wasn't prepared for what actually loaded on my screen.

The moment the internet entirely betrayed my parenting

I can't stress this enough: don't, under any circumstances, assume that search engines understand your parental context at five in the morning. Instead of a fluffy Christmas special, my phone gleefully informed me that the cast of baby reindeer consisted of Richard Gadd, Jessica Gunning, and Nava Mau, and that the show I was about to broadcast to my impressionable two-year-olds was a critically acclaimed, wildly explicit, TV-MA rated psychological thriller about severe stalking, grooming, and horrific sexual trauma.

I threw the television remote across the room as if it had suddenly burst into flames.

It hit the wall, bounced off a radiator, and landed in a puddle of something I sincerely hoped was spilled water but was probably worse. I sat there, heart hammering against my ribs, realising I had been exactly three seconds away from exposing my toddlers to graphic depictions of a man's life unravelling at the hands of a relentless stalker named Martha who sends 40,000 unhinged emails. Florence stopped crying about her sock just to look at me, clearly sensing that her father had just narrowly avoided the sort of parenting disaster that gets you permanently banned from the NCT WhatsApp group.

I've spent entirely too much time thinking about how easily this could have happened. I spent an entire day fuming about the naming conventions of modern television. If you're creating a bleak, harrowing, Emmy-winning autobiographical series about surviving sexual assault and psychological torture, perhaps don't name it after a diminutive, fuzzy arctic mammal. Name it something accurate. Name it "The Endless Voicemails" or "Trauma in a London Pub." Don't give it a title that sounds like a discontinued line of festive plush toys sold at a garden centre.

What the professionals say about my near-miss

When I later confessed this near-miss to Dr. Evans at our local NHS surgery (while we were there because Matilda had shoved a frozen pea up her left nostril), he looked at me over the rim of his glasses with the specific brand of exhaustion reserved for parents of toddlers. He muttered something about how children’s developing prefrontal cortexes are highly porous, and while they might not understand the complex psychological nuances of a Scottish comedian being aggressively stalked, the loud noises, screaming, and general atmosphere of dread could theoretically induce a fair bit of anxiety.

I suppose that makes sense, though frankly, trying to parse exactly what damages a toddler's psyche feels like nailing jelly to a wall, seeing as Florence had an absolute mental breakdown yesterday because I peeled her banana "too aggressively." Still, my health visitor Sarah (a woman who once told me my swaddling technique resembled a hostage situation) has always been very firm about trusting my own anxiety with media, suggesting that if a show makes me want to rock back and forth in a dark room, it’s probably best kept away from the girls until they’re at least thirty-five.

The things that actually keep them occupied without causing psychological damage

The whole traumatic morning made me realise how heavily I was relying on screens to act as a digital pacifier, and how quickly that can backfire into exposing my children to prestige television trauma. It made me incredibly nostalgic for the newborn days—a sentence I never thought I’d type, considering I spent the first six months of the twins' lives in a state of sleep-deprived hallucination. But when they were tiny, I didn't have to worry about Netflix algorithms serving up psychological thrillers; I just had to worry about keeping them breathing and occasionally washing a muslin cloth.

In fact, I genuinely miss the days when I could just lay them under the Bear and Lama Play Gym Set and let the wooden beads do the heavy lifting. My sister actually bought this for us when the twins were born, and it was one of the few items in our house that didn't look like it had been violently extruded from a plastic mould in neon primary colours. The little crocheted bear and the wooden star were so quietly engaging. I used to sit there drinking cold tea, just watching Florence bat clumsily at the lama while Matilda stared intensely at the wooden rings as if trying to solve a complex mathematical equation. It was peaceful, it didn't require an internet connection, and there was precisely zero risk of it suddenly depicting a harrowing scene of substance abuse.

Now that they're two, of course, the play gym has been retired to the loft, replaced by things they can actively throw at my head. In a desperate bid to pivot away from the television that morning, I dug around in the toy basket and unearthed a Panda Teether that Matilda had abandoned weeks ago. It's perfectly fine as far as pieces of silicone go—it survives the dishwasher, which is my only real metric for success these days—though she mostly uses it now to threateningly wave at her sister when a dispute over a wooden block arises. It didn't soothe her, but it did distract her long enough for me to hide the television remote behind a stack of unread parenting books.

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The aftermath of the Google incident

By 6:30 AM, the crisis had mostly been averted. The television remained strictly off, standing in the corner of the room like a dormant threat. I had successfully managed to dress them both, which is usually an Olympic-level wrestling match. Florence was wearing her Organic Cotton Baby Bodysuit, the sleeveless one that I specifically hoard because she has skin that flares up in red, angry eczema patches if she so much as looks at a synthetic polyester blend. I'll say this for that bodysuit: it has survived an astonishing number of blowout nappies and emergency hot washes without losing its shape, which is more resilience than I can currently claim for myself.

Matilda, meanwhile, had insisted on wearing a thick wool jumper despite it being unseasonably warm, but I had lost the will to fight her. We sat on the rug, surrounded by scattered oat biscuit crumbs, building a very wonky tower out of blocks, aggressively avoiding any mention of reindeer, baby or otherwise.

The lesson here isn't just about double-checking the media ratings before you hit play, though that's obviously quite high on the list. The real lesson is that in our absolute exhaustion, we parents lean on the easiest available crutch—the search bar, the smart TV, the algorithmic feed that promises three minutes of silence so we can just drink a coffee while it's still warm. But the internet is a deeply weird place, largely entirely indifferent to the fact that you're just a tired bloke in London trying to stop two toddlers from destroying a rented flat.

If you want to survive the early mornings, avoid the search engines, put away the smart devices, and just let them play with a wooden spoon and a saucepan on the kitchen floor until the sun properly comes up.

Ready to swap the digital panic for some actual, tactile peace of mind? Explore our range of gentle, natural toys and organic essentials before the next toddler meltdown strikes.

Frequently asked questions about my search history

Did you ever honestly find a video of a real baby reindeer?

No, I entirely gave up. By the time my heart rate returned to normal, I decided that all deer-related media was banned from the house. We watched a five-minute video of a train going through the Welsh countryside on BBC iPlayer instead. It was incredibly boring, which meant it was absolutely perfect and exactly the right speed for my fragile morning mental state.

My child is asking about the Baby Reindeer show because they heard older kids talking about it. What do I say?

You lie. You look them dead in the eye and tell them it's a boring documentary for grown-ups about moss in the Arctic circle, and they would hate it. There's absolutely no reason to try and explain the nuances of dark comedy and psychological trauma to a child. Just pivot immediately to offering them a snack. Bribery is your best friend here.

Are there any safe search terms if I honestly want winter animal videos?

I'd strongly suggest typing "nature documentary caribou calf" or "BBC Earth winter animals." Whatever you do, keep it clinical and scientific. The moment you type "baby" and "reindeer" together, the algorithms assume you want to dive deep into Richard Gadd's emotional trauma. The internet has ruined cute terminology for all of us.

Why don't you just set up parental controls on the television?

Because setting up parental controls requires remembering a four-digit PIN that I established three years ago while sleep-deprived, and my brain has completely overwritten that information with the lyrics to the theme tune of Bing. I tried to reset it once and the TV locked me out of everything except the Spanish news channel for 24 hours. Now I just live in fear and rely on my own lightning-fast reflexes.