Faye and Baby Gabriel in Fight For Life. Photograph: BBC
Last night's Fight For Life was I think a first. It was a programme that devoted an hour to babies, their births and what horrors might befall them during the birth process without once using the word 'vagina'.
It also managed to avoid the word 'poo'. Which is quite an achievement when you consider that one of the babies featured, little Gabriel, had prematurely opened his bowels to evacuate his meconium and had ended up with it clogging his lungs in utero. Even the po-faced 'faeces' was avoided.
In fact this was possibly the most twee programme about human life I've ever seen. Andrew Lincoln's narration was almost a parody of itself, with his breathless tones and his repeated use of the word 'amazing' sounding as though they wouldn't be out of place in a comedy show taking the piss out of celebrity narration of documentaries.
Also, given that this was a programme about babies and their birth, there was no mention of how babies are made in the first place. Nor did any of the mums once utter the kind of expletive that most normal people spew out when in pain / under stress / being filmed.
So instead of poo and vagina, we had meconium and birth canal. Oh, and nobody said 'cervix' either. Bizarre, given that this went out at the witching hour of watershed o'clock. And even if mums and dads are recording it for their offspring to see in an educational kinda way, then surely it would make sense to use the correct terms rather than be coy about it.
There was some great photography and innovative ways of presenting stuff that were genuinely moving, but I hope future instalments are a bit less twee and coy and a bit more engaged with the wonder of human life in all its gory gloriousness.
