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. And that would have meant not being able to review the next programme on my list, The Biology of Dads.
Which turned out to be so bad it made A Century of Fatherhood suddenly look right up there in genius documentary terms with Little Dieter Needs To Fly and Touching the Void. A psychologist called Laverne Antrobus went on a ‘journey’ — as all presenters in TV documentaries must, of course — to discover the surprising truth about men and their children. And guess what? Turns out — stap me vitals! — that the role a father plays in child-rearing is much, much more important than we’d hitherto thought.
To illustrate this, Antrobus treated us to a remarkable experiment. We watched how a child in the womb responded first to the sound of its mother’s voice, then to its father’s. Quite extraordinarily, incredibly, amazingly, remarkably — or so the programme thought — Dad’s voice caused an even bigger increase in baby’s heart rate than Mum’s did.
In vain did you wait for this experiment to be validated by some sort of control. Perhaps a different man could have tried talking to the baby to see whether its response was prompted by male voices in general or Dad’s in particular. Perhaps they could have investigated the possibility that a voice speaking right up close to the belly (Dad’s) is more stimulating than one speaking from a couple of feet above (Mum’s). But no, we were expected to take on trust that the experiment proved what they claimed it did. If this is their idea of scientific rigour, I see a bright future for them at the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit.
Why did I find both programmes so profoundly irritating? It wasn’t so much the sheer dumbed-down uselessness of the execution — like a second-rate GCSE social sciences class from a thick teacher — as the underlying cultural assumptions. This was TV designed for wimpy New Dads who don’t have wives or girlfriends but ‘partners’, who feel a surge of righteous pleasure every time they go shopping for nappies at the supermarket with a baby strapped to their backs, who believe it’s a really great idea that small businesses should be even more taxed and over-regulated than they are already with compulsory paternity leave. I’m not one of them.
Lennon Naked (BBC4, Wednesday) had been shoehorned into the season on account of the fact the sarky, cruel, IRA-supporting Beatle had been irreparably screwed up when his dad Freddie (Christopher Fairbank) had abandoned him when he was six. But the psychobabble rarely got in the way of a superbly well acted, sharply scripted (by Robert Jones) drama about the weirdness of being the world’s most famous pop star.
Particularly impressive were the scenes between John and Yoko (Christopher Eccleston and Naoko Mori), which were done with such intelligence, sensitivity and commitment that not for one second did you go ‘Aaaaghh! Horrible, pseudy Japanese witch’. Rather, it made you want to go ‘Ahhh, but this is so touching and beautiful and pure.’ You even thought this in the scenes where they recorded themselves caterwauling, bashing plant pots and blowing through the early 1970s equivalents of vuvuzelas; even when they dressed in white and held poncy art happenings. They deserved each other, truly they did.
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