Disputed paternity

Apart from Punishment Day, Beating Day, and Kill-One-Of-The-Pets-To-Teach-’Em-That-Life-Is-Harsh-Random-And-Unfair Day, I’m generally not one of those fathers who goes in for cruelty and neglect of his children. I’m too busy working my arse off to feed, clothe and educate the ungrateful sods, that’s probably why.

Apart from Punishment Day, Beating Day, and Kill-One-Of-The-Pets-To-Teach-’Em-That-Life-Is-Harsh-Random-And-Unfair Day, I’m generally not one of those fathers who goes in for cruelty and neglect of his children. I’m too busy working my arse off to feed, clothe and educate the ungrateful sods, that’s probably why.

But having sat through some of the rubbish the BBC tried to fob us off with this week as part of a season pegged to Father’s Day, I’m thinking of changing my policy. Both A Century of Fatherhood (BBC4, Monday) and The Biology of Dads (BBC4, Tuesday) were so maddeningly annoying, so emetically politically correct that just to punish the BBC I think I may be forced to starve Boy and Girl for a week and send videos of their pathetic bleatings to whichever prize pillock was responsible for this pile of pants. On the videos I shall scrawl the message: ‘YOU MADE ME DO THIS.’

A Century of Fatherhood had some lovely old footage of life in Britain in the early 20th century and some charming interviews with sundry old dears recalling how much they loved their dads. But all this was quite ruined by the fatuous premise, which it clearly thought was bold and counterintuitive but in fact was anything but, viz: ‘You thought Edwardian dads were remote and unloving. But this is just a myth.’

At least I’m presuming that is what the subsequent 50 minutes said. I’m afraid I gave up after the first ten, because I knew that if I saw one millisecond more of Professor Joanna Bourke (the one who wrote that stupid war book saying that men actually enjoy killing one another) gushing vapidly about the conclusions she’d drawn from reading 250 journals by working-class men, I would destroy my TV set.