Greg likes wearing a baseball cap with the words "international polo championships" on it.
His car licence plate spells out the word PROSPER. He is also a motivational speaker who says things like "if you're slack, you become a slacker". And now he wants to pass his DNA on to the next generation. He wants to breed. He wants to be a dad.
But is this a good idea? Take the incident in the car for example, which is one of the scenes that opens the BBC's Wonderland film A Dad Is Born (BBC Two, Thursday, 9pm). Greg is driving with one hand and trading the financial markets on his laptop with the other. And it looks like the deal is going well.
"Chicken dinner, that's a winner!" he says. "Yeah baby. High five, we've just made six grand." One day, his child could well grow up and be like this too. Thirty years from now, he or she might also high-five someone and say, "Yeah baby, we've just made six grand". Is that what you want?
I can see what the makers of Wonderland are trying to do – they're trying to make me dislike Greg (and they've succeeded) but, more than this, the film – which follows three men through the birth of their child – is trying to make us think there are many potential fathers who could do with retuning their approach to women and to fatherhood.
The implication is that Greg is more focused on work than his partner and child; that the second father, Jamie, is overanxious; and that the third, Viktor, is essentially a child himself. But the portrayals are cartoons that spring from the cliche – spread mostly, it has to be said, by women – that when it comes to parenting, men are a bit useless.
The second programme about fatherhood this week, Daddy Day Care (Channel 4, Wednesday, 9pm) did exactly the same thing. The idea was that three men about to become fathers would be sent to a nursery to see what it was like to look after children. Before the men arrived, the all-female nursery nurses gathered in the staff room and shook their heads and made faces as they explained why men were rubbish at childcare.
The film then appeared to prove the women right. Ex-soldier Stefan, for example, was sent out into the playground and decided that what the children needed was a bit of drill. He then tried to change a nappy. "Yes, that's definitely a poo," he said and, by the end, was quite pleased with his efforts. "It's not a lot different from rifle drill," he said, "except that a baby moves more than a rifle."
The problem with all of this – even though the idea of following birth from the male point of view is good – is that it doesn't reflect what's really happening. Most real dads don't confuse rifle drill with nappy changing. Most real dads don't avoid their responsibilities; they relish them, and are rather good at them. So why are these programmes suggesting the opposite? Is it because it's the best TV narrative (the idiot-turned-genius narrative) or is it because it fits in with a story many women secretly like: that men are useless with babies – and that they are empathically brilliant?
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