'Jack Whitehall: Fatherhood With My Father' Review: Babies Not on Board
I’ve often wondered what the whole having-a-baby thing is like for dads. “What’s it like for dads?” I asked myself, as I howled like an injured wookie in the labour ward, while my other half polished off the NHS-issue fish and chips. “What’s it like for dads?” I pondered, as I sat in an armchair breastfeeding my baby for the fifth time one night, while my sleeping partner spread out like a starfish in our bed. “What’s it like for dads?” I mused, as my sense of self slid quietly out the door. So thank god! Jack Whitehall – and his dad – are here to enlighten us in the form of a new four-part TV show: Jack Whitehall: Fatherhood with my Father. Some answers at last.
Comedian Jack and his dad, Michael, are a familiar double act, having trundled around the world together for five series of Jack Whitehall: Travels with My Father. Their dynamic is well established by now: Jack is impish, immature and amusing; Michael is stiff, sweary and exasperated. They obviously get on deep down of course, and the new show at least purports to announce a new chapter in their relationship as Jack begins a new one of his own, having become, by the second episode, the father of baby Elsie. Here will be a chance for Jack to explore the travails of modern parenthood, while also getting a better understanding of what his own dad must have been through while raising him; or as Michael puts it, that “there's more to life than just arsing around”.
The first episode, “Birth”, at least has a veneer of genuine enquiry. Jack and Michael attend an antenatal class (great!); Jack and Michael learn about perineal massage (hmm); Jack tries out an empathy belly (sigh); Michael zaps Jack with a TENS machine (ho ho!); Jack leaves Roxy and Elsie in London and flies with Michael to America to get swaddled by a celebrant in a spiritual rite of passage (...Oh). The giant blanket may be on, but the gloves, as far as Jack's real TV-making agenda goes, are off.
“Since little Elsie has come into my life, I’ve been thinking a lot about protection,” he says, at the start of episode three, “Survival”. “Not that kind of protection,” he quips, because he can’t help himself, “although to be fair I have also thought quite a lot about that because right now the idea of having two of them… fuck that.” No, what he means is protecting his baby from the perils that the world may bring: Doomsday, the zombie apocalypse, nuclear annihilation. “We’d probably be better off baby-proofing the house,” Horner suggests while she stands at the sink doing washing up, as Jack slumps over the breakfast bar eating a carrot.
To be fair to Jack though, who wants to watch tired parents installing a baby gate? So instead, while Horner stays home to put covers on the plug sockets, he and Michael are off to Utah to meet some heavily armed survivalists and tour luxury condos inside a vast nuclear bunker. In the episode before that, “Technology”, he and Michael were in Cornwall meeting a sexy robot, and then in California to meet unhinged people who insert magnets under the skin, in order, er, for Jack “to understand how body modification might affect Elsie in the future.” Later he’ll go to a medical centre in Italy and a sweat lodge in LA for… I forget.
Of course it’s all silly, and of course Whitehouse know that. Despite the occasional archive clip of Michael and baby Jack in days gone by, it’s hard to believe he’s devoting even one iota of seriousness to the thesis of his own show. He's simply using it as a loosely thematic justification for a few more whacky adventures with his grumpy pops (and his also quite sound-seeming mum, Hilary); any emotional evolution that may or not be happening to him is taking place firmly off-screen.
If you've watched all five seasons of the previous outings by Whitehall père et fils, you might also find the formula is losing its potency. Jack will make a joke about Michael being 100 years old; Michael will tell Jack to fuck off; repeat ad infinitum. It’s definitely predictable, and possibly a bit tired. But – try as you might to resist it – it is also an easy televisual trot-along that works.
Whitehall’s gift has always been to lean in to and turn to his own advantage the things that others might find most objectionable about him: his poshness, his wimpishness, his uselessness. He’s clearly pathologically unable to resist undercutting any serious conversation with a silly gag, but like it or not, he’s also genuinely very funny. (I laughed out loud when he kicked out a dainty leg while posing for a group photo with a bunch of brawny preppers: he might not have muscles but he’s got balls.)
And yes, the format’s a little old and a little lightweight, and you’ll learn next to nothing about having a baby – except that when you’re massaging someone’s perineum, you should treat it like the face of a clock and rub it “from three to nine” – but actually, who really wants emotional excavation on a Wednesday night? And certainly not from a posh, wimpish, useless comedian (damn it! He’s got me again!). The thousand-dollar “what’s it like for dads?” question can remain unanswered for now; to be honest, no one was that interested anyway. As Jack says when he staggers out of the sweat lodge, his naked mum clambering out behind him: “Fuck it, this is a television show, they’ve got enough for the edit.”
‘ Jack Whitehall: Fatherhood With My Father’ is streaming on Netflix now
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