It’s Time to Overthrow These Baby Dictators

Babies now come with more closely typed instruction manuals than a combined DVD/VCR player. In the US a new 24-hour television network is being launched called Alpha Mom TV. It’s aimed at the woman who treats motherhood as a business in which she and her baby want promotion. Alpha Mom’s Isabel Kallman, a former Wall Street executive who founded the station with Vicky Germaise, says her aim is to ‘empower Moms with knowledge’.

My advice is to switch off the TV, give your baby a cuddle and ban the dreadful word ‘empowerment’ from the dictionary. We’ve entered the age of the all-or-nothing mother. If you’re not perfect, you’re hopeless. If your baby isn’t sleeping through the night by nine weeks, you’re both delinquents.

A new book, Baby Secrets, by maternity nurse Jo Tantum and TV producer Barbara Want, is smugly prescriptive about baby care. The section on breastfeeding is completely baffling, and I’m speaking as someone with two children of my own. Its top tips on breastfeeding are these: ‘Skin to chin ‘Nipple to nose ‘Tummy to mummy his tummy should be across your tummy unless you are doing the “rugby tackle” hold.

‘Put baby to breast: never take your breast to the baby.’ In a book that’s short on humour, that last bizarre line at least gave me a laugh.

But can we cut out the bossy advice about baby care, and can we stop punishing new mothers before they even get started?

Motherhood isn’t a science, a career or a competition. And it isn’t something you learn by watching a TV screen or reading a handbook. Really hopeless mothers are terrible at the task, whatever instructions they are given. But let’s give all the other mothers a chance to muddle through before we start telling them they are doing it wrong.

And the top prize goes to the foulmouthed drunks!

Nothing in life is certain, but tickets for a hit West End show should be a safe bet. I assumed my children would love The Lion King, but beyond saying thank you they barely said a word as we left the theatre.

And against all my own expectations, I found it a tawdry and manipulative affair, dressed up in spectacular outfits.

The plot is predictable, the comedy routines worthy of the village panto and the lyrics appalling.

And what on earth was going on with the drains? As if it wasn’t hard enough to concentrate on the tedious business unfolding on stage, a stench of mildew and cabbage wafted up my nose from start to finish. A hefty Pounds 156.65 for three seats at the furthest edge of the stalls wasn’t what I would call a fair exchange.

After the show, as my children and I walked along a dark, narrow street to catch the late bus home, a group of drunken young men appeared in front of us. ‘**** off, you ****er,’ one of them yelled at his mate. And then they saw us.

But instead of doing what I expected, which was to push us into the road at the very least, one of the men turned to his friends and shouted, ‘Oi, you lot. There are children here. Watch your language.’ The man who had been swearing immediately apologised and the whole group of them insisted on walking behind us to the end of the street ‘to make sure you get to the zebra crossing safely’.

Which just goes to show that expectations can let you down. Who would have thought that in a contest between a top West End musical and a group of foulmouthed drunks, the men would win first prize for courtesy and the musical would get top marks for cynicism.

Cool Cruise and his premiere bully As it turned out, Tom Cruise didn’t need a new fiancEe to help him attract publicity for his new film, War of the Worlds. The spoof TV crew who squirted him with water from a fake microphone at the film’s premiere did the job perfectly. But didn’t Cruise handle it with aplomb? No shrieking, no hiding behind his security guards, no Prescottstyle hysteria. Just calm, icy fury and a pincer grip around his assailant’s left wrist. It was a masterclass in how to make the classroom bully look a complete fool.

Don’t spoil fiction with facts Are we so starved of decent ideas for radio and TV that we have to cobble together documentaries from scraps of fluff?

The new trend is to take a fictional hero, find someone in real life with very slightly similar circumstances and then make a dismal show about it.

It’s not so much ‘real fiction as ‘drear friction’.

For instance, Dr Raj Persaud presents The Real Frasiers (Radio 4, 3.45pm, Monday to Friday this week).

The series of programmes about psychiatrists with their own radio phone-ins would have been fine without lashing the whole wobbly structure to the Frasier comedy series on TV.

But The Real No 1 Ladies Detective Agency, on BBC2 next week, is infinitely worse. In fact, it’s just about the worst documentary I’ve ever seen. It’s badly written, appallingly narrated and dull, dull, dull. The real-life private eyes are supposed to be replicas of Alexander McCall Smith’s characters in his bestsellers. But there are few similarities and barely any real connections.

It’s the TV equivalent of Cinderella’s ugly sister cramming her foot into the glass slipper and shrieking, ‘It fits, it fits, it fits.’