The simple wonder of childbirth

You don’t know whether to applaud the chutzpah or scold the laziness of the person who dreamt up One Born Every Minute. As Channel 4 continues its scramble to find a replacement for ailing cash-cow Big Brother, the concept does have the faint whiff of desperation. ‘Erm, babies! Everyone loves babies! Let’s show real babies being born!’

You don’t have to subscribe to Christopher Booker’s claim that all of literature can be boiled down to seven basic plots to at least concede that the best ideas are deceptively simple. As every soap-opera hack knows, introducing a pregnancy or birth is a quick method of spicing up any stale storyline, even if, as

Real births are admittedly a different matter. Plenty of people have been making birth videos since the technology became available, but they were hardly likely to make it onto the shelves of Blockbusters. Up until recently – as we’ve seen plenty of times in the Sixties-set US show Mad Men – dads would sit it out over cigars and brandy until the whole sordid business was over. And there is still something of an understandable squeamishness around so private and personal an act being broadcast to the world, as evidenced when

Yet it is difficult not to be moved by One Born Every Minute. It is filmed in the maternity unit of a general hospital in Southampton, and has the rather simple premise of following mothers-to-be through their births, interspersed with occasional talking-head interviews with the patients and the maternity staff. A normal hour-long edition largely involves women screaming in agony, women lolling around dosed up on epidurals, and women waiting around anxiously for something to happen. The fathers, or birthing partners, either sit around looking useless, or sometimes say irritating things. As

The whole thing, however, is heart-wrenchingly beautiful in the soppiest, sweetest possible way. Because you get lovely little babies at the end! Unlike today’s gloomy neo-Malthusian crowd, the cast of One Born Every Minute simply cannot get enough of them. You get the occasional bits of human interest and backstory but the predominant business of the show is getting you in, getting someone else out and getting on with the endless drama of life.

The show’s website reads like a tub-thumping piece of Stalinist propaganda on behalf of the Ovum Office: 264 every minute worldwide, folks! If you think watching birth after birth on TV might get repetitive, you might be surprised at how mesmerising the

The monumental cheeriness of Channel 4’s Monday night schedule was brought into sharp relief by the miserable offerings from BBC3. There, viewers can currently enjoy a season of programmes that may or may not be called Sex is Dirty and Will Kill You Unless You Do Precisely As We Say. This week, actress Jaime Winstone was investigating the question Is Oral Sex Safe? (real title) in what was apparently ‘essentially a science programme’. Is that what they’re calling crass sex education shows these days? Anyway, half an hour into the programme it hadn’t got very far towards answering the question of the title, although we did find out that Jaime was very upset that a friend of hers died of a cancer not caused by oral sex. She then read out a poem tattooed on a cancer survivor’s back and cried a lot while exclaiming that she didn’t know what kind of cancer you’d get from oral sex. After this pile of essence, I didn’t really want to stick around for the science. I think the answer to the Jaime’s question, to paraphrase Woody Allen, is ‘not if you’re doing it right’.

Anyway, where was I? Oh yes. Hello, Tristan Evans of Vancouver – in your face, Dave. Hello, Rory Samuel James Walter of Marlborough, NZ…

David Bowden is spiked’s TV columnist.