MMA fans stayed up all night to watch Bellator 206, they got Peppa Pig instead

MMA fans were given quite the shock when they were shown Peppa Pig instead of Bellator 206 in the early hours of the morning

Channel 5 viewers were shown Peppa Pig rather than an MMA event (@SeanSheehanBA / Twitter)

Imagine this, you have stayed up all night to watch the a packed Bellator 206 only to be denied watching the main event.

The bill from San Jose contained 13 fights, including six on the main card and was being shown live through the night in the UK on Channel 5.

At 6am, just as Gegard Mousasi and Rory MacDonald were preparing to face each other, viewers in the UK were left stunned when the coverage changed to Peppa Pig.

Some were unimpressed after they had stayed awake until the early hours especially for the fight. One fan on Twitter described the switch to the children’s cartoon as “some sort of sick joke”.

“It’s government regulation that at 6 a.m. that content was not suitable so they had to switch to children’s programming, ” said Dave Schwartz, Bellator senior vice president of marketing and communication, when asked about the transmission. “‘Peppa the pig’, yes.”

Bellator company president Scott Coker said that they are going to work on their scheduling to include UK viewers in the future. “I think that when I think about the replay, I think that we can probably work it out,” Coker said. “But it’s six in the morning on a Sunday there and we won’t be able to work this out until Sunday our time, Monday their time. But we are working on it.

“Believe me, when it switched over there were a lot of texts going back and forth and they all were not friendly. We were trying to fix it, we thought it was a technical glitch. But it wasn’t, it was a governmental issue. I can promise you the next time it’s not going to happen. We’ll keep it down to five fights instead of six — like we normally do — and we tried to overdeliver for the fans and we just went over. It’s an unfortunate situation.”