Television - Andrew Billen finds Babyfather all washed out and wayward

The website set up to help turn Babyfather (Wednesdays, 9pm, BBC2) into more of a cult than it will ever be makes fascinating reading. It confirms this white man's hunch that what's wrong with this well-meaning drama about four black male friends is that it isn't black enough. Davinia Gre dared to say it first on the website's message board. When asked what she meant, she replied: "You couldn't tell what their individual cultures were, where their families were from." Someone else noted how little black music was played and asked if it was credible that not one of the four men ever came home to a meal of rice and peas. I might add that more weed was smoked on Bob and Rose.

We are not talking Oreo syndrome here. Babyfather is not another Cosby Show, where a black family is permitted no discussion of racial identity at all. But in the first three episodes of Avril Russell's dramatisation of the novel by Patrick Augustus, we have seen not the faintest hint of white-on-black racism. Whities get the walk-on parts as policemen, bookkeepers, referees - token positions of responsibility - that television dramas traditionally award black actors. But this is a rule-abiding group of baby-fathers, and when one of their children gets a police warning (for something pretty minor), it is made clear that the boy's behaviour flows from confusion at home, rather than inner-city poverty or its accompanying gang culture. We are encouraged to ponder the moral failings of the four black leads, unencumbered by any thought of the historic and social conditions that may have formed them.

Let us take them man by man, flaw by flaw. Primus inter pares is Gus (David Harewood), handsome and improbably wealthy from running his parents' jewellery shop. His flaw is (yawn) yuppy commitment-phobia. By episode three, his story seems to be resolving itself into a choice between two desperately suitable women: a single-parent lawyer who is aggressive out of the sack and shy in it, and a rather sexier student (teaches salsa, you know).

Gus's best friend is Beres (Wil Johnson), a car mechanic whose behaviour can verge on the violent, but whose main moral failure is that he is too conservative for current tastes. He does not want his daughter to marry a white boy, sees his wife as a baby factory, and then is shocked when she runs off with another woman. Babyfather, so careful not to patronise its characters because they are black, ends up patronising them because they are men.

The potentially more interesting characters are Johnny and Linvall, because their stories deal directly with absentee fathers and black male fecklessness, two cliches that have blighted the lives of too many generations of black children. However, something goes wrong with this discussion.

Johnny (a character very well played by Don Gilet) has managed to get both his wife and his girlfriend pregnant. The farcical possibilities of this mean that his promiscuity is made to look endearing and even funny.

Meanwhile, Linvall (Fraser James) actually is an absentee father, although his son has a good idea who this concerned male is who noses about in his life. Yet the script lets Linvall off the hook by letting it be known that he would have been more involved if had been allowed to by the mother. Currently, Linvall is being bedded by a rich white socialite. Again, the question that springs to mind - in this case, what is the social power dynamic in the relationship? - goes unasked. Never mind. I'll be astonished if, in the next episode, Linvall does not end up with the mother of his son.

The whole piece tiptoes around the issues that Spike Lee has made a career out of confronting directly. Cultural fears of marrying out and miscegenation are reduced to jokes about "cream in my coffee" or rants by the old-fangled Beres. Black male promiscuity is written off as comedy, whereas Johnny's reasoning that "every black man is trying to build an army and sometimes it's too big for one woman, so you have to recruit soldiers" is more disturbing than funny.

The producer of Babyfather, Alison Lumb, and the director, Alrick Riley, have decided to adapt a book more interested in unlikely twists of plot and terrible coincidences than in being thoughtful. Did anyone not wince at the "bombshell" that Guy's salsa teacher was his own half-sister?

Being fearless about looking absurd because of its plotting is the only brave thing about Babyfather. It is far too scared about scaring horses, black or white, to dare to appear serious about its subject. The result is bland. The series should be a riot of colour - no pun intended - but it feels washed out. There is good work in it. Any chance to see more of Britain's black acting talent on television is to be welcomed, and it is a pleasure to see Harewood and James freed from their ward duties on A&E and Holby City. But Babyfather is not black enough, not real enough, and not good enough.

Andrew Billen is a staff writer on the London Evening Standard

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