Is the patriarchy as all-powerful as it’s cracked up to be? The Baby Has Landed reviewed

Anybody who watched the opening episode of The Baby Has Landed (BBC2, Wednesday) might have found themselves wondering if the patriarchy is quite as all-powerful as it’s cracked up to be. The programme follows ‘six families over six life-changing weeks’ as they welcome a new member — and on the whole features women who radiate authority and men who do what they’re told.

The most experienced parents are Nigel and Helen Pierce, first seen embarking on a lengthy quest for shoes as they tried to get their four children under five out of the house so that Helen could go to hospital and have a fifth. As old hands, they passed the time during labour doing crosswords. (‘Breed of hunting dog? You have your contraction and get back to me.’) Afterwards, an off-screen voice asked Nigel why he’d decided to have such a large family — and soon discovered that he hadn’t. Initially, Nigel said, he’d have been happy with no children, but faced with his wife’s highly developed maternal instincts had agreed to two, and then to four, and now to five. ‘Marriage,’ he concluded without apparent irony, ‘is about compromise.’

Meanwhile, in Nottinghamshire, a woman called Sara was encouraging her son-in-law Mo to make sure he attended the birth of his first child, pointing out that if he didn’t ‘I’ll knock you all over that bedroom and hand myself into the police’ — although on a gentler note, she did add that ‘I don’t expect you to be down there looking at stuff’. Luckily Mo, too, had learned the art of compromise. As an Egyptian who’d met his British wife Syler when she was on holiday in his country, he comes from a tradition where the husband’s natal duties consist solely of waiting to hear that the birth has taken place.