By Bruce Robbins

IT IS hard to imagine a more innocent gift for a seven-year-old girl than a My Little Pony DVD—unless, that is, it contains nothing but hardcore pornography.

That’s what a Forfar dad found when he put a DVD bought at Tesco’s Riverside Drive store in Dundee into his machine and hit the play button.

Seconds earlier, his daughter had been sitting beside him but, fortunately, she’d gone into the kitchen for a glass of milk when a sex film appeared on the TV screen.

The father, who asked not to be named, was outraged at the discovery and took the offending disc back to the Dundee store yesterday in the hope of having the children’s title removed from the shelves.

He said, “When the film started playing, I had to shout through to my wife in the kitchen and tell her to keep our daughter in there.

“If she hadn’t gone for a drink, she would have been sitting beside me when this started up. I watched it for a minute and there’s no doubt it was hardcore pornography.

“I bought a My Little Pony DVD at the store on Monday but it wouldn’t play so I took it back yesterday and swapped it for another.

“This one kept coming up with an error message but after the third or fourth try, it did start up. The DVD box was wrapped in cellophane and hadn’t been tampered with and the disc had pictures of ponies on it.

“It was just luck that my daughter didn’t see what was on the screen.”

The DVD was produced by Middlesex company Prism Leisure Corporation who expressed their horror that adult material should end up on a children’s DVD.

Quality control manager James Ingram said it was “extremely regrettable” but stressed that the error would have been made at the factory where the DVDs are “replicated.”

He said it was not the first time that something of this nature had happened but random checks of their stock had failed to find any similar disc mix-ups.

He explained, “It’s really human error that causes it. It can happen when they are setting up the machines in the replication plant.

“When something like this happens, there are probably no more than six DVDs in every 2000 with the wrong material on them. We take this very seriously as there is no way we want to be selling My Little Pony as hard core pornography.

“It’s even more unfortunate that this happened on a children’s title but it’s really down to the manufacturers. It has happened in the past and each time we have asked the manufacturers to carry out more stringent checks.”

A spokesman for Tesco said, “We will be withdrawing the product from our shelves and we will be contacting the supplier.”