MISBEHAVING MUMS TO BE – BBC Three, 9pm, Thursday14th of April
The next bullet in BBC3’s dead-eyed firing round of shows for ‘young parents’, Misbehaving Mums To Be catalogues the sins of a couple of pregnant women. One puffs away 20 fags a day, one is morbidly obese swilling chips’n’gravy every night, and the other likes a drink. Should they be? No. Do we care if they’re having trouble giving up? No. Is this programme wholly pointless? Yes. Can we all move on with our lives? Hope so.
First lets take Juliet. The promo notes for the show state that she’s “struggling to cut down from her normal four bottles of wine a day,” ie: she’s a bit of a lush and needs immediate help. Turns out she’s not, she’s only on one glass of red wine on a Sunday since discovering the bun in the oven. Then there’s Kayley, the fattie with much more than a bun in the oven. She’s quite amiable and shocked to learn that fistfuls of chocolate aren’t great for your kid, so duly cuts down, and good on her. The third is Heather, the most unsympathetic, a woman getting through twenty Mayfair smooth a day while happily resting the ashtray on her baby bump. She can’t hack the guilt and stops participating in the documentary halfway through. Well done Heather.
Nurses, midwives and even counsellors are brought onboard to cajole the women into giving up their respective vices. And, slowly but surely, they learn the errors of their ways. There you go! Done. But no, not done, because they seem to have plied an entire series out of the cold dead hand of this wanky format. Next week we can look forward to a particularly dim pregnant woman reasoning that her smoking makes the baby’s ‘heart stronger’, the kind of woman for whom all human scientific endeavor amounts to nothing but a boring textbook. Can’t be arsed to learn about science? Make up your own! Good idea love.
Guess what? Don’t smoke or drink when you’re pregnant, and try to eat a healthy diet – there, I’ve saved you an hour of tutting, eye-rolling and trying not to fall asleep. Buy me a pint sometime. Not if I’m preggers though. Obviously.
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