Television - Zoe Williams is pained by the whole birthing experience

On the premise that Madonna has one, Catherine Zeta Jones has one, and that even she, too, has one, Zoe Ball explains the thrust of her new series, The Real Birth Show (Channel 4, 8.30pm), thus - babies are the new fashion accessory. And as such, it's a living travesty that they do not have a whole programme devoted to them, like shoes and bags and herbaceous borders do. This is where you run into a problem: babies on their own are curiously uninteresting characters, quite unable to unite the qualities of excessive enthusiasm and mindless babble that this kind of format requires (give them a year and a half, of course, and they'll be naturals). Consequently, you are forced to talk to their mothers instead. Recent mothers, as everyone knows, have suffered a 90 per cent drop in their IQ - witty dialogue is as far from their reach as the chance of having a complete conversation without stopping to disabuse their baby of the vomit around its chops.

So, take one cheerful Ball, one evolved Dutch mother and her partner, one single mother, one single, partially sighted mother, one midwife with a funny nose, and put them on a sofa. Give them a topic, like, for instance, home births. What do we need now? Interesting camera angles and weird yellow lights, of course! How else can you persuade the young that this is a trendy, up-to-the-minute personal event, as opposed to, let's say, nine months of unspeakable tedium when you can't drink or wear nice clothes, followed by a number of hours of exquisite pain? And this an event to which, to cap it all, your mother beat you by about, oh, 31 years?

There is no glamour whatsoever to this situation. There might conceivably be glamour once you've got two tots and can dress them up in matching Comme des Garcons outfits, but the actual process is mucky, workaday and, let's face it, grindingly predictable. (On that last point, though, it seems I am wrong. "You have to have complete confidence that this is going to happen," says a midwife to a lady in a birthing pool. "Well what else is going to happen?" I mused. "She could drown, and the baby could be strangled by the umbilical cord," said my companion, who is currently weaning herself off Prozac.)

Given this absence of both banter and high style, the show's magazine-telly format is distinctly strained. Doubtless realising this, the programme-makers splice in short films, made by the mums-to-be, charting their progress from pregnant, through still-pregnant, to no-longer-pregnant, via the goriest birth scenes I have ever witnessed. These have the earnest-amateur feel of those kids' infotainment films that used to be woven into Why Don't You!?! - for reasons beyond the urban intellect, they always started with a man saying: "HELLO! I'm Farmer Samson, and those two bulls over there are my bulls!" There were questions of human interest here, such as, why is that Dutchwoman maintaining her flawless English even in the throes of labour? What exactly does Imogen have against hospitals? ("They don't seem conducive to an intimate experience," she said. Hasn't she ever seen ER? Where's she been, in a box?) What is the psionic connection between owning wind-chimes and wanting a home birth, and can it ever be broken? And who, in their sane mind, would ever choose rose oil and warm water over pethidine in a pain situation?

But otherwise, The Real Birth Show is tedious to the point of actual physical pain. There probably is majesty in this experience, but it is completely uncommunicable to the outside world and, as far as I know, always has been. Anyone familiar with that US import, the "baby shower", will have a fair idea - a bunch of young mothers sit around and talk about the profundity of the experience, and how horrid it is to pee afterwards. ("I thought everything was going to come out!" said Zoe. She's a charmer, it's got to be said.) Every synapse in the non-mother's central nervous system screeches: "Get me out of here! They've all gone mad! They've been colonised by an alien species! Like that bit in The Stepford Wives!"

That said, there are lots of mothers and pregnant people knocking about in this country. They must be interested in this kind of thing, because they talk of little else. This is a bit of a flight of fancy here, but perhaps they quite literally enjoy watching other people giving birth.

There are genres - cookery, for example - that make good telly, even for people who are not interested in the activity per se. This, frankly speaking, isn't one of them. However, there is room in our multichannel age for special-interest telly that would make the average person rear up in horror: look at The Antiques Roadshow. So, no, I'm not saying ban this evil programme - I'm just saying stick it somewhere in the morning schedule, some time when only lazy-arsed breeders are available for television viewing. Please God, don't put it on when I might just have come in from the pub.

Zoe Williams is a columnist on the London Evening Standard. Andrew Billen is on holiday

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