Fireman Sam Koran row: How hidden messages and slip-ups can land children's TV shows in hot water

Populated by characters who always neatly solve problems, salvage friendships and learn important lessons in the space of one episode, few things are more innocuous than children’s TV shows. Except that nothing in this rotten world is sacred, and kids’ entertainment is made by adults who can’t resist the temptation to show how clever – and, by extension, how cheap – they are.

Poor Fireman Sam is the latest cartoon to be embroiled in a controversy caused by its creators, after the eponymous hero was shown slipping on some sheets of paper left on his fire-station floor – one of which was a page from the Koran. Following an uproar online, Channel 5 has now pulled the offending episode from its streaming site. And HIT Entertainment, which produced the show, has apologised “unreservedly” to viewers and blamed an external animation studio for the mistake, explaining that the page was intended to show “illegible text”.

It’s likely we’ll never know why or how the page was selected. But in the cartoon conspiracy stakes, it’s up there with the VHS version of Disney’s The Rescuers, which came out the year after its 1997 cinema release. Somewhere along the line, an animator had inserted into a window – which the characters soar past – a photograph of a naked woman, Fight Club-style. (The upshot was that, in 1999, Disney had to recall some 3.4 million copies worldwide.)

But these are covert operations. In plain sight, as any watcher of The Simpsons knows, there are plenty of winks to grown-ups. But they may not know that this knowingness even extends to SpongeBob Squarepants, a seemingly innocent cartoon about a yellow invertebrate who lives in Bikini Bottom (itself a name taken straight from a seaside postcard). For example, in one scene, SpongeBob watches wide-eyed as a bright orange sea anemone undulates on his TV screen, but quickly switches the station when his pet snail Gary enters the room. “I was just looking for the sports channel!” he says, laughing nervously. In another, Spongebob prepares Gary a bath but tells him “not to drop” the soap. A giggly day at the Nickelodeon studios?

And we can’t just blame the creatives for this narrative of sullied innocence. Audiences are also guilty of creating it. Take the British animation Captain Pugwash – which first transferred to small screen from the page in the late 1950s. To the hilarity of adults ever since, Pugwash’s creator John Ryan guilelessly named three of his characters Master Bates, Seaman Staines and Roger the Cabin Boy. Except he didn’t. Decades after the programme aired, Ryan’s daughter revealed that her late father had been traumatised by the urban myth, which was invented by a student newspaper and later taken up without checking by national media.

Hopefully, any surviving producers of the British 1970s show Rainbow can better bear the recent allegations of one Pastor Daniel Erickson-Hull of Chigwell that its theme tune lyric “paint the whole world with a rainbow” was created to “homosexualise” children. But then, music is a rich field of research for all sorts of tin-foil-hat wearers. Most notably, the Beatles were accused of covering up the death of Paul McCartney and replacing him with a doppleganger in the 1960s, after listeners claimed to hear John Lennon mumbling “Paul is a dead man. Miss him” in “I’m So Tired” and “I buried Paul” in “Strawberry Fields Forever”.

Before then, of course, there were said to be endless clues to McCartney’s demise in the record, sleeve and lyrics of Sergeant Pepper – a Beatles addict called Joel Glazier has written about this stuff at length – and after on Abbey Road. No wonder, then, that for the 1995 augmented recording of John Lennon’s demo for “Free as a Bird”, the surviving ex-members of the band did a bit of “backmasking”, as hiding backwards secret messages in tracks is known. (At the end of the song, there’s a clip of him saying, “Turned out nice again”.) McCartney explained they did it “for a laugh, to give all those Beatles nuts something to do”.

The B-52’s also took pleasure in poking fun at fans by adding the line “I buried my parakeet in the backyard. Oh no, you're playing the record backwards. Watch out, you might ruin your needle” at the end of the 1986 track “Detour Through Your Mind”. And at the height of fears that heavy metal musicians were spreading Satanic messages with their music, Ozzy Osborne couldn’t help but tease listeners when he referenced an expletive line from The Exorcist in the 1988 song “Bloodbath in Paradise” with the backmasked lyric “Your mother sells whelks in Hull”.

There’s no evidence that the Fireman Sam farrago was intended in similar vein, as a joke; or to cause offence, either. And it may just be that it was an innocent mistake – as it was when Nike had to recall a line of shoes in 1997, because the abstract design of the sole-treads seemed to spell out “Allah” in Arabic. But really, we'd need one of Fireman Sam's police officer colleagues to investigate that.