TV Review

There are some things about fatherhood that you can only learn through hard experience. For example, if you want to mount a defence of your efforts to share the burden a new baby has just dropped on you then you must, under no circumstances, do it from a departure lounge where you are waiting to embark on a four-day footballing jolly with your mates. You poor innocent fool, I thought, as I watched Mike doing just that in You, Me and the Baby (BBC2), Fiona Kelly's engaging film about the seismic shock of the first child. Didn't it occur to you for a moment that they're going to cut straight back to your wife, doing housework with one hand as she changes the baby's nappy with the other? Were you born yesterday?

Mike later redeemed himself, as much as men ever can in these circumstances, by taking time off to look after the baby while his partner Claire went back to work again. "I do feel sorry for him sometimes", she confessed in a sequence filmed in the car on the way to the office, "but I can't let him know I feel sorry for him". It would probably have been redundant anyway because Mike was feeling quite sorry enough for himself, having learnt by now that child care involved more than staring fondly down at a sleeping baby. In the uneasily comic sequence which began the film he was seen drumming his fingers distractedly on his wailing daughter's tummy, and staring forlornly into space.

I was Mike once - exhausted, baffled, hanging on to the corpse of my former life like some deranged mourner who refuses to let the funeral take place. And as a result I felt a certain bittersweet pleasure of identification while watching Kelly's film - with its detailed account of the stations of the cross through which most novice parents pass: the bituminous awfulness of newborn poo, the tetchiness of sleep deprivation, the Gordian complexity of a baby's car-seat, the morphine-like bliss that floods through you when they finally close their eyes. I tried at several points to imagine what it would be like to watch this from the complacent perspective of the childless - and failed, because this is one border over which there is no return. And even if they do watch - in a spirit of schadenfreude - I doubt if the childless will inwardly digest the lessons to be learnt here. Evolution has dropped some protective veil of incomprehension between parents and non-parents, which is only violently torn away by the arrival of a baby itself.

I imagine they might find entertainment even so - because the couples here offered some nice variations on the commonplace experiences. My favourite sequence was the scene in which Betty, a statuesque Italian model, took her new baby to casting call. The brief seemed to be "Cruella de Ville" from the look of her competitors, several of whom shrank visibly from this squirming reminder of their biological potential. The baby capped the moment with a muffled but very squelchy expulsion. I didn't really intend to watch it all - but I did and now I find I want to know how they get on from here.

In 16 years' time Mike's daughter will be staying out late and he'll be threatening to kill her when she gets back. Provided, that is, that someone else isn't threatening to do it too, in which case parental irritation will vanish in an instant and he'll pauperise himself to get her back. This is what happens to David Suchet and Geraldine James in Seesaw (ITV), Deborah Moggach's kidnap drama. The title suggests that some kind of reciprocal tilt is in store, and since this first part only takes you as far as the fulcrum (the handover of pounds 500,000 in return for the couple's sulky teenage daughter) it is a bit difficult to say whether it will deliver something more than a standard thriller. For the moment it is pretty much business as usual - rather too prone to easy ironies (the father is a manufacturer of security devices) and a little unconvincing in its psychology. But there are nice dabs of childish coldheartedness - "She's not worth this much money" says the younger sister, helping to load bricks of money into carrier bags - and it might yet give the stomach an unsettling lurch.