Television - Eight hapless dads-to-be allow themselves to be patronised. By Zoe Williams He's Having a Baby (BBC1)

A baby, Davina McCall tells us, "is born in Britain every 45 seconds". I wish there were some sort of nuclear italics that could convey the scale of McCall's emphasis as the presenter of He's Having a Baby (Saturdays, 6.35pm), a new ten-parter. It seems to me that the more banal the fact she is imparting, the more emphatic she becomes. I'm surprised she didn't lose an eyeball.

"And for every baby, we know what that means, don't we?" (Cue Saturday-night innuendo and frantic winking, which might account for the protection of the eyeballs.) "And on this hastily constructed counter" (I'm playing slightly fast and loose with the actual quotations, here) "we're going to count the number of babies that are born during the whole of this show!?*!" It seems to be a feature of 2005 that the general public will imbibe facts more easily if they are given some kind of clicker device. Whether it's deaths of African children or the birth of British ones, we need a celebrity to click their fingers at us or show us a large clock before statistics make any kind of sense. Call me a purist, but I find this depressing.

Caught in a still photograph, McCall has rather an arch, school-marmish, attractive face, the kind that a man of a certain age might fantasise about if he were in a single-sex school doing only sciences. In action, she gurns outlandishly. "How do you feel about having a baby?" she'll ask some hapless male, while her mouth attempts a cartoonish scooch off her face and her eyebrows reunite with the rest of her hair. The participants look a bit scared, as we would all be, faced with this kind of disconnect between form ("I've just said something hilarious! Oh, shoot me, shoot me!") and content ("That was really quite a straightforward question"). But please do not waste any sympathy on them. They should have known from the get-go what kind of bilge this would be. Save your sympathy for African children. I can click my fingers for you, if that would help.

Now, I'm afraid I didn't take down the names of all these dads-to-be, on account of how, until they were all in the same room, I thought they were all the same person. The only thing that made me laugh out loud about this show was the bit on the BBC website that describes "eight men on their very different journeys to becoming first-time dads". Different, my monkey - they all say the same things: "Well, I think my life's going to have to change quite a bit"; "I'd say I'm pretty organised, but not as organised as wife/girlfriend is"; "I don't think I'm going to like getting up early". There is a small amount of variation - we have a fairly recent convert to Islam who likes football so much that, if you cut him, he would bleed sky blue (I believe he supports some kind of blue team), which seems to me pretty naked right-on point-scoring (even the recent converts, folks, aren't necessarily out to get you - some of them are proper dads; they're as worried about antenatal classes as you or I!). There's a very young couple, the male arm of which charmed me rather by claiming that he didn't mind having kids so young, because he'd already seen as much of life as he needed to see. (His lady-friend said: "A lot of people see me as young, because I'm only 17. They shouldn't judge me by my age." I shall desist from pointing out the logical flaws in this argument. I'm going to wait until her baby is born instead, and then steal candy from it.) Indeed, if you were to meet them all in a pub, they would probably turn out to be very different people, but that is why McCall is so indispensable to this meet-the-public genre. She effortlessly directs everybody into the same narrow, miserable cliches, I presume to save the producers from the stress of the unpredictable. She's like the parking attendant of mind-Ikea.

Anyway, besides being gurned at by Davina, these guys are also given babies to hold. Don't worry, folks! The mums are right there, just off camera! Phew, thank God. Because you know what men are like: left on their own, they probably would have devised some kind of baby-volleyball with real human young. Then they are shown a video of women giving birth, and they all make appalled faces and mutter dark remarks about how it's not as bad, or maybe it's the same, as open-heart surgery. And all the women laugh at them in a fond and patronising way. Bless! They think it's like an operation, when really it's a beautiful thing!

How can men allow themselves to be paraded like this, as some kind of endearing idiot-foe? Where was Michael Buerk when this programme was being dreamt up? Is there any kind of justification for spending licence-fee-payers' money on a programme that only people who are too pregnant to find the remote control will ever watch? Every 45 seconds, this show throws up a new and serious question about public ser- vice broadcasting, gender relations and, indeed, modern civilisation. To apprehend the seriousness of this fully, what we need, people, is a great big clock.

Zoe Williams is a columnist for the Guardian

Andrew Billen is away

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