‘Most men don’t want to talk about this, and that isn’t going to change overnight’
Rhod Gilbert talks to KATHRYN WILLIAMS about sharing his experiences of male infertility, admitting he still isn’t sure about telling his story in a new documentary but says it’s an important subject
RHOD Gilbert is best known for being a comedian. But in recent years he’s found another niche, being searingly open and honest about the most personal of struggles.
With his brand new, one-off TV documentary, the seasoned comic, beloved for ranting about duvets and service stations, focuses on the much more serious – and often taboo – subject of male infertility.
During my 30-minute open and honest chat with Rhod, he admitted that he felt compelled to see the infertility documentary through despite not really wanting to do it – and he also spoke candidly about his mental health during the lockdowns and why his stand-up routine has now changed.
But while the subject matter is serious and earnest, Rhod’s delivery is inevitably, well... pure Rhod. He’s a master of delivering a tough subject with bit of gruff amusement and spouting the type of language you might expect from an episode of The Inbetweeners.
Carmarthen-born Rhod and his wife, comedy writer Sian Harries, who have spent lockdown in London, were, along with thousands of other couples in the UK, undergoing fertility treatment until the pandemic put all the stops to procedures.
This also put the brakes on the documentary – Rhod Gilbert: Stand Up to Infertility – which sees Rhod become the face of a campaign of male fertility. Rhod said: “We had all this momentum in the campaign and then Covid happened and everything stopped including our fertility treatment and the documentary.”
The comedian has already touched upon male infertility during his comeback stand up tour, The Book Of John and he says making this TV show is vital.
“Most men don’t want to talk about this, and that isn’t going to change overnight because of this documentary, it’s going to take a long long time,” said The Work Experience frontman.
“Most men are not going to come up and talk to me, this is just the tip of the iceberg really. Once it goes out I suspect it will be very different.”
In the documentary you see Rhod talking to a man who also struggled to conceive with his wife and he tells an open-mouthed Rhod that his wife underwent eight years of invasive treatment before it was even considered that he should be checked.
“That’s not even a one-off, that’s broadly what happens,” added Rhod. “All the focus is on the woman, for various reasons, and the men are quite happy to sit in the background. It’s the same story over and over again, [that’s] considering men are half of the issue, and just as likely to have the issue.
“If you rock up and you say you’ve been trying for kids, what tends to happen is that couples will rock up at a fertility clinic and they’ll see a gynaecologist.
From there onwards you are then broadly investigating a woman.”
The documentary has some pretty revealing moments, with Rhod filming himself in the fertility clinic, about to deliver a sperm sample.
“It gets across how you feel in that room,” he says. “When you think about it, led downstairs to a room to masturbate with everyone on the other side of the door, imagine that? It’s insane! Sat there in the waiting room, nudging each other and pointing. Awful. Everybody watched you go off, they know where you’re going. It’s mortifying. I’ve got a joke in my show how I pretend to be Rob Brydon.”
Does the Gavin & Stacey star know about this cheeky bit of identity theft?
Rhod, who is currently hosting Comedy Central’s new series Growing Pains as well as about to launch the third series of his and Sian’s podcast, The Froth, laughed: “D’you know what, I was on Would I Lie to You and I told him he might be getting some funny messages, but he’s got five kids or something!”
While Rhod has waited a while for the documentary to go out and he was apprehensive about its broadcast, he knows how vital it is to spark a conversation.
“I’m still nervous about it,” he admitted. “From the moment I first pitched this to BBC Wales, I was in two minds. Every day we were filming, I was thinking ‘is this really what I want?’ and you can see that in me, it comes across – being the face of infertility, for Christ’s sake?
“And I still feel like that, I’m doing it because somebody has to do it. I can’t say I’m looking forward to it going out – I don’t want it going out – but it’s important.”
He’s expecting some negative feedback, but he’s ready to take it on the chin.
“I know there’ll be negative stuff. It’s partly why the documentary is needed; we live in a world where men, this macho, bull ***** thing, when Benjamin Zephaniah was saying [in the documentary], I can’t have kids and all the blokes around him were like ‘bring your woman to me’ – I know I’m going to get that. Being passed in a van and being shouted at. But I do think it’s important, so I’ll take it on the chin.”
If his last Stand Up To documentary is anything to go by, the reaction and opening of conversation should be expected, most definitely in the positive sense.
In 2018 Rhod, who honestly tells me that his mental health suffered during 2020, shared his social anxiety issue on Stand Up To Shyness, and he says it completely changed his standup routine.
“That was the first time I’d done something about me, so honest and open and different,” said the 52-year-old, who lost his dad in 2020.
“The response I got, it opened up a whole new world to me and I had a completely different response.
“I had a letter from an 80-year-old woman in Canada who said she’d watched the programme and been shy all her life, and that response really moved me and I thought I’d like to do more of that, touching people on a different level.
“It did change everything. After the shyness documentary my stand up got a lot more personal, so The Book Of John was unlike anything I’ve ever done in the past.
“Shows have always been invented nonsense over the years and this one I talk about heart attacks, strokes, death, infertility, it’s a real gear change and it started with that shyness documentary.”
I share with Rhod my concern over putting his personal struggles on film really puts him through the ringer, what with his two Stand Up documentaries, his honest revelations about mental health and the amazing care home episode of Work Experience which broke the whole country, but he assures me he’s a pretty chilled out bloke most of the time.
“A lot of my life is writing stuff,” he says. “That show [Book Of John] took months and months of sitting in a room or a garden chilling. And it might not look like it because BBC repeat stuff all the time. It looks like I’m always working.”