A friend of mine recently described to me her first week with a new baby.
“It’s like you’ve been involved in a car crash, but then you’re handed a baby to look after,” she said. “And no one seems to care much about the car crash bit.”
I thought about this while watching The Baby Has Landed, a new fly-on-the-wall documentary series following six families in their first six weeks with a newborn, with all its attendant highs, lows, shoulder-sick stains and whispery arguments. Think an extended special of One Born Every Minute, but with more frozen meals.
We open to an emotional altercation between our first couple, Mo and Syler, presided over by her mother Sara.
The two met as teenagers on holiday in Mo’s birth country of Egypt, later marrying and moving to the UK to live in Syler’s three-generation home in Nottinghamshire with the forthright Sara and grandfather Pat.
One day before Syler’s C-section, Mo is struggling with the idea of being in the room when she has the baby — most men in Egypt wait outside the hospital. “Don’t say you’re going to be there and not be there,” Sara tells Mo, “Or I’ll knock you up to that bedroom and deliver myself into the police station — after she’s had the baby.”
We also meet Helen and Nigel, at the other end of the baby-making scale, preparing to welcome their fifth child. Helen, previously a diplomat and medic, always wanted a big family.
Nigel wasn’t keen on kids but “marriage is a compromise” so now he’s on his way to a netball team. He looks a little harried. One of the most moving stories is that of Paul and Craig, readying their immaculate home for surrogate twins.
As a teenager, Craig never believed he would have a family, but in an emotional flashback we watch as his work friend and surrogate Mel opens a sealed pregnancy test on Skype to deliver a positive result.
Mel, who has two older kids of her own, is open about the emotional minefield of carrying someone else’s baby: “You can’t just steam into [it]” she says, “You have to have it worked out in your head. I don’t know how I’m going to handle it, I could get really upset.”
The show is well edited, chopping deftly between the six families. As ever it’s the little human moments which make it so watchable, like Syler’s uncle breaking down when he meets her baby — the family’s beloved grandmother died nine months earlier — or when Hermisha’s mother and sister dance with excitement when her contractions begin.
If the success of a fly-on-the-wall documentary hinges on two factors — just how access-all-areas the filming really is, and how interesting the subjects actually are — then this show gets it right. Telly-wise it’s certainly no car crash, even if it might feel like one for its new parents.
