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Kelly Rissman
US News Reporter
“RIP Jack the lad, long live Jack the dad!” So declares Jack Whitehall in the first episode of Netflix’s Fatherhood with My Father. The plummy-voiced comedian has previously been joined by his curmudgeonly octogenarian dad Michael to journey around the world for five seasons of their show Travels with My Father. As filming begins, Whitehall Jr is on the precipice of parenthood himself, expecting a baby with his partner Roxy (their daughter Elsie was born last year). So to prepare for this huge life change, he’s embarking on an odyssey of learning that will make him the best dad possible – and he’s bringing Michael along in tow, dressed like Michael Portillo with the colour saturation turned down.
Or, at least, that’s the pitch, but what follows is essentially an excuse for Whitehall pere et fils to trade hit-and-miss generation-gap banter as they take part in a series of increasingly bizarre activities, with an increasingly tenuous link to parenting. In episode one, they’re attending an antenatal class (“Roxy has gone to all of ours while I was on tour,” Jack says, in a remark that’s perhaps unintentionally revealing about the true travails of celebrity child rearing) and faffing around with a transcutaneous electrical nerve stimulation (TENS) machine so that our dad-to-be can feel the pain of childbirth. So far, so vaguely relevant.
But by the latter half of the series, they’re doing dance classes in the metaverse (Michael is unimpressed that his green, Gollum-like avatar “looks like a f***ing newt” while Jack’s resembles a video game hero), exploring an apocalypse bunker in Kansas and driving around Los Angeles in an armoured vehicle. The activities, it seems, have been chosen to elicit bewilderment from Michael rather than actually provoke meaningful chats about parenthood between them.
Whitehall Sr is especially averse to anything that carries a whiff of spirituality – “What the f*** does that mean?” he grumbles when Jack gleefully tells him that they’re due to perform a ritual with a life cycle celebrant. It’s a pattern that soon wears thin, to the point where you can accurately predict his reaction almost exactly. From the moment the celebrant tells the pair that they need to think about things they want to banish from the next stage of their life before the baby arrives, you know he’s going to write down irritants including “New World wines” and “The Guardian” instead of anything remotely happy-clappy.
Both he and his son feel trapped in their TV personas by clunky scripted gags. It’s a shame, because both of them are genuinely funny when they’re allowed to riff off one another organically, like when Jack quips that Michael probably enjoyed the way that old school baby monitors used to accidentally pick up their neighbours’ conversations, because “he could have roleplayed being in the Stasi”, or when Michael goes off on a strange tangent about the monks who taught at his school.
The format doesn’t give them space to actually cover much emotional mileage either. Both men are too tied up with their japes to ever really get stuck into a proper chat about what makes a good parent; Roxy and Jack’s mother, the likeably no-nonsense Hilary, are often reduced to rolling their eyes at the silly men from the sidelines.
The most profound it gets is during an episode all about longevity when Michael suggests that his son would be better off just spending time with his child rather than messing around with biohacking in an attempt to prolong his life. It’s hard not to draw similar conclusions from the show overall. Surely the best way to learn about parenting is to, well, do some, rather than squabbling in the metaverse with your elderly dad.
