How Auntie gave birth to a reality show actually worth watching
Reality is getting repetitive. i’m a Celebrity . . . has deteriorated into a catalogue of dull rituals: crawl through maggots, eat a kangaroo meatball, take a nearly nude shower, keep doing it for three interminable weeks.
Viewers have been abandoning the X Factor so emphatically, the show couldn’t be less popular if Prince andrew was one of the judges.
the problem with these shows is they’ve all been slogging along for too many years. We’re bored by the same old competitions.
But there’s still an eagerness for fresh reality formats — look at the excitement that the relative newcomer love island stirs up.
The Baby Has Landed (BBC 2) has at least attempted to devise a new type of reality show. the cameras have been hanging around its six families and their newborn for so long that the exhausted parents barely register them — which leads to some candid moments.
Craig and Paul, who were so guarded in the opening weeks, were beyond caring in last night’s instalment. a row about who got out of bed to heat the baby milk for their twins became open recrimination over something much more serious: Craig was scoffing chocolate cake in the middle of the night. ‘ Why didn’t you touch the Hobnobs?’ hissed Paul.
Shabazz and Hermisha were trying to speak in code that neither the cameras nor their two little boys would understand. But it was obvious what was frustrating them. Since baby Ramiyah arrived, they weren’t getting any nookie.
these glimpses of real life made the final part of the series much more engaging than it had been at the start. Perhaps film-makers should install fixed cameras and leave the families to get used to the idea of being watched.
When they’ve really let their guard down, that’s the time to start recording. We might learn the truth about that chocolate cake, too.
the format was strengthened with the introduction of eilidh and Richard last week, who went to hospital expecting a straightforward delivery and found themselves plunged into a nightmare.
too often, documentaries like these gloss over the harsh fact that about one in 50 children has a disability, often from birth — that’s an estimated 800,000 in the UK under the age of 16. life-threatening illness at birth is also much more common than most people might realise.
Parents who have to deal with that all too frequently feel ignored by soaps and dramas.
it became obvious within hours of his arrival that eilidh’s baby Peter was seriously unwell. Meningitis was diagnosed and for the next few days no one could say if he would survive. ‘it went from being one of the happiest moments of our life to the week of hell,’ Richard said.
thankfully, Peter slowly began to recover and, after two weeks, was able to go home . . . not entirely to the approval of his sister Grace, an assertive toddler who felt he was hogging Mummy’s attention. Speaking of assertive toddlers, Philomena Cunk has been commenting on the events of 2019 all week in five-minute bites, on Cunk And Other Humans (BBC2).
the clueless ‘opinionist’, played by Motherland actress Diane Morgan, has a knack for neatly summing up things she doesn’t begin to understand, like a wise idiot.
She described the endless heatwaves, deluges and gales as ‘the weather on shuffle mode’, and the suicide of Jeffrey epstein as ‘ a freak necktie accident’ that happened ‘ while one of his prison guards was blinking for too long’.
Cunk is howlingly funny. the only pity is that these pithy shorts are far too . . . short.