The Independent

Last Night's Viewing: A Dad Is Born: A Wonderland Film, BBC2

17 February 2012 12:00 AM

On the face of it, Greg Secker did not look like a promising candidate for fatherhood. He drives a Lamborghini Murciélago with a vanity plate that reads "PRO5PER", he shouts "Yeah, baby!" at moments of triumph (apparently without irony) and he already has one broken marriage behind him, which meant that he could talk fondly about his first son in Kira Phillips's A Dad Is Born: a Wonderland Film, but had received lawyers' letters forbidding him from actually appearing on screen with him. He's also a motivational speaker, pumping out You-Can-Be-As-Rich-As-Me bombast at expensive seminars for wannabe Gregs. I wouldn't say I took an instant dislike to him, but that's only because my reactions are getting a little sluggish with old age. And yet by the end of Phillips's film, I felt almost fond of Greg, so genuine did his responses to his new baby appear.

Last Night's Viewing: Daddy Daycare, Channel 4<br />Versailles, BBC2

16 February 2012 12:00 AM

"I get the feeling sometimes that the staff want us to fail," said Stefan, one of three men who featured in Daddy Daycare, a Channel 4 reality series designed to address a social crisis that almost certainly doesn't exist. I don't mean for a moment, by the way, that there are no incompetent or deadbeat fathers out there. Or that it isn't useful for even the most well-intentioned man to learn some lessons about childcare. But the implication that today's men are unusually bad at fatherhood ("Modern British life has spawned a generation of dysfunctional dads") is surely not true. Even the horror statistic used to underwrite this exercise in mental re-education could be seen from another angle as a silver lining: "Almost half of all mothers feel fathers don't do their share," said the voiceover at the beginning of the show. Really? You mean that as many as 50 per cent of mothers now feel fathers do? The truth of it was that it wasn't the staff at the south London nursery Stefan had been sent to who wanted him to fail. It was the production company. And even they only wanted him to fail a bit comically in the first half so that he could recover in the second, make a public act of contrition, and score a modest triumph before the final credits.

Last night's viewing - How to Grow a Planet, BBC2; Jo Brand on Kissing, BBC4

15 February 2012 12:00 AM

There's an obvious machismo problem if you're going to move from presenting a programme about tectonic forces to a series about botany. With the former you can abseil off the lip of an active volcano or do a piece to camera while diving into the flooded rift between two continental plates. It's positively Action Man compared to wandering through a wood and looking at flowers. So, kudos to Iain Stewart and the How to Grow a Planet production team for coming up with the most aggressively blokey way possible to convey the evolutionary advantage that toughened seeds confer on those plants that have them. Load up an empty shotgun cartridge with canna indica seeds and blast away at a plywood target. Excellent. You can do the slow-motion footage of the muzzle-flash. You can get your presenter to prod his finger through the smashed bull's-eye. And then you can plant the recovered "ammunition" and show how they can still do what seeds are meant to. If Guy Ritchie had been asked to film a GCSE biology module this is what it might have looked like. Except Vinnie Jones would have been wielding the shotgun, obviously.

Last night's viewing - America's Serial Killer: True Stories, Channel 4; Protecting Our Children, BBC2

14 February 2012 12:00 AM

America's Serial Killer: True Stories was a little baffling. There's that title for a start. America only has one serial killer right now? That seems implausible, and in any case you'd think people might be wary of stirring the murderously competitive element that sometimes seems to drive serial murderers. Or was it supposed to suggest that this serial killer – an unknown man who has been murdering sex-workers and dumping their bodies on Long Island – is archetypally American in his modus operandi? And then there's the film itself. What are we supposed to do with it other than feed our appetite for narratives of depravity? Perhaps that, and that alone, is the point. Audiences find serial murder fascinating, and although this particular story can't supply the catharsis of a monster brought low (the perpetrator is still out there somewhere), it can scratch our itch to know the worst.

Review of Being Human: ‘Being Human 1955’

13 February 2012 12:13 PM

Following on from an episode tinged with tragedy, this week lifted the mood with something lighter.

The Weekend's Viewing: Home of the Future, Sun, Channel 4
Toughest Place to Be...a Train Driver, Sun, BBC2

13 February 2012 12:00 AM

In Home of the Future, Channel 4 has gutted a standard family house and filled it with the kind of technology that is "predicted to turn our lives into the stuff of sci-fi dreams".

Robin Scott-Elliot: Plenty of country and western, but no taking your partners by the hand

13 February 2012 12:00 AM

View From The Sofa: Manchester United v Liverpool, Sky / Country at the BBC, BBC 2

World Have Your Say, World Service, Tuesday Outlook, World Service, Tuesday
Soul Music, Radio 4, Tuesday

12 February 2012 12:00 AM

A cry for help on air from Homs as the bombs fall...then silence

Inspector Montalbano, BBC4, Saturday
How to Grow a Planet, BBC2, Tuesday

12 February 2012 12:00 AM

Who would want to fill the 'Borgen' slot on BBC4? Sadly, mouth-watering views of Sicily and oodles of pasta do not a detective drama make

Last Night's Viewing: Super Smart Animals BBC1<br />Bullets, Boots and Bandages: How to Really Win at War BBC4

10 February 2012 12:00 AM

In today's cliché verification news: Scientists reveal old dogs can learn new tricks and new findings suggest elephants really never forget. Well... one old dog anyway, a canine Einstein called Chaser, who has acquired a vocabulary of more than 1,000 different names for different toys and can fetch them on demand. Chaser can go further still. If you stick a new toy down in a pile of familiar ones and use a name she's never heard before, she'll mill about a bit anxiously before figuring out that that must be the one her handler means. In the second of Liz Bonnin's series Super Smart Animals, Chaser was the first act up, in a variety show programme intended to showcase the fuzziness of the once-sharp demarcation between our intelligence and that of animals. The elephants were next on, thanks to their ability to remember the location of food sources and waterholes in the Botswana bush, a knowledge they appear to be able to pass on to strangers.

Last Night's TV: Kevin Bridges: What's the Story? BBC1 / Roger and Val Have Just Got In BBC2

09 February 2012 12:00 AM

It's supposed to be fatal to explain a joke, but Kevin Bridges doesn't seem unduly anxious that he's going to kill his comedy.

Last night's viewing - Death Unexplained, BBC1; Alex Polizzi: the Fixer, BBC2

08 February 2012 12:00 AM

It's always pleasing when programmes contain practical advice and Death Unexplained delivered fairly early. It came from the police and was passed on by coroner Alison Thompson: "If by any chance you do kill your partner without meaning to, of course the best thing you can do is actually ring and say you've done it as soon as you can. Once you start prevaricating you've had it." Very understanding, the police. These things happen, just don't tell fibs about it. What's the best thing to do if you meant to kill your partner, they didn't say, but then you can't have everything.

Last night's viewing - Coppers, Channel 4; SuperScrimpers, Channel 4

07 February 2012 12:00 AM

"Is it funny or is it tragic?" asked one of the policemen in Coppers. "I don't know." Cruelly, I'm guessing that it isn't an either/or for most people. In quite a lot of instances, it's funny and tragic, as was the case with Barbara, arrested by armed response unit officers after turning up at someone's house and pointing a gun through the window. Most people, faced with four or five agitated armed police officers, might decide that a certain amount of diplomatic retreat was in order. But not Barbara, who was heavily soused on vodka and seemed to believe the police had turned up to back her up: "He's robbed my watch!" she screamed repeatedly, a picture of outraged innocence. And she didn't much help her cause when she got back to the station: "I don't believe in robbing people and hurting people," she said reasonably, before suddenly remembering the injustice of her situation, "but I'll kill that bastard!"