Dominic Sandbrook

Men about the House purported to be a contribution to BBC4's Fatherhood strand and made very little sense indeed. One of those clip-show social histories, it was notionally a survey of how sitcoms had reflected attitudes to fathers over the last few decades. If you thought this might imply the presence of children you were only half right. The first two examples were Albert Steptoe and Alf Garnett, both of them fathers, it's true, but the stars of shows that were less about fatherhood than generational friction. The historian Dominic Sandbrook was allowed to point out that Some Mother's Do 'Ave 'Em was about slapstick not fatherhood, but then they tried to rope it in to the thesis anyway, as they did with Reginald Perrin, a comedy about almost anything but fatherhood.

Perversely, the programme made you wonder why fatherhood had been so marginal a subject in British comedy - one answer to that question being bluntly practical. Most child actors have the comic timing of a talking clock and even the few that don't are hedged in by child-protection legislation, making filming a nightmare. You either have to leave the children out entirely - as Marion & Geoff brilliantly did, or find a different way of working with them, as Outnumbered worked out, though significantly that comedy, one of very few you can think of that directly addresses the aggravations and absurdity of modern fatherhood, wasn't even mentioned here, even though it found room to squeeze in Father Ted. If you have to rewrite history because you can't get the clips clearance, then perhaps it isn't worth writing the history at all.