He's Having a Baby

Millions of men become fathers every year and this series picked eight to follow in the latter stages of their pregnancies. With the aim of helping the clueless male of the species learn about the challenges ahead of them, we follow their lives (not just the impending babies) as the big day approaches – all watched over by the caring gaze of Davina McCall. Meanwhile Danny Wallace tracks the numbers of babies born in the past week and looks for anything even half interesting to get a laugh out of.

With all their celebrity flops, it looked like ITV was going to continue the dominate the world of rubbish television programmes that are put in prime slots only to slowly die and then be moved into a quieter time slot, but this programme proved it wasn't to be. No, after about 5 episodes, this series was floated into a very early Saturday slot and had its run cut from 10 episodes to 8. Hearing this I wondered why – after all, nothing on a Saturday evening is any good so why this failed over all the other crude was interesting to me. Watching it I can see why it flopped, because it is so poorly structured that it totally failed to engage me. There is no real focus on anything so we tend to just interview them and follow them around. It is meant to be based on the characters themselves, but most of them are fairly bland and they don't engage at all.

Davina tries her hardest to make it interesting but she really can't. She overdoes her facial expressions – asking an ordinary question but widening her eyes as if she had just said the wackiest thing in the world. She can't make it work and her effort just makes her look desperate and needy. Danny Wallace is not a great comic, although he is a nice guy at times. Here he is annoyingly smug and is trying to draw laughs from poor material and "wacky" touches that are actually really unimaginative. The people themselves are OK but they can't carry the series and they are the failure of the series.

Overall, not any worse than the normal rubbish that is on Saturday night TV but just a bad idea that isn't delivered at all. The lack of focus and structure makes it messy and unengaging. The presenters try hard but it is all too much for them and they just end up desperate and the regular "awkward silences" from the audience only make it more painful to watch. Very few people actually bothered to watch this and I can totally see why.