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Apart from endless repeats of Family Guy and Snog Marry Avoid, its programming is typically founded on the kind of awful documentaries that feature thirteen-year-olds collecting offspring instead of Pokémon and screaming at their stepmothers because the cornershop’s run out of budget vodka.
This passionate and noble tradition is firmly upheld with Misbehaving Mums To Be, a show which features pregnant women smoking, drinking and poking their babybumps round street corners in wartorn Benghazi with the sort of gormless look normally found in asylums.
They all say exactly the same thing when questioned – “I aint stupid. I aint stupid. I know runnin’ round rebel camps with a sign sayin’ GADDAFFI IS GOD might be bad for the baby, but, yaknow, I like it, so why should I stop, yaknow?”
A prime example is Heather, who smokes twenty a day and has cast-iron proof that she doesn’t need to quit – she also didn’t quit while she was having Ella (presumably named after Rihanna’s most famous chorus) and she was okay. “Mummy, please don’t smoke in here,” says Ella. “It’s my house, I’ll smoke where I bloody well like,” snaps Heather as her boyfriend looks on approvingly (spare the rod, spoil the child, after all). His expert view is that the stress caused from quitting would harm the baby anyway, so why bother? “And anyway,” Heather points out wisely, “the smoke’s going into my lungs, not my baby’s.”
Something just doesn’t ring true about this, however, and so the Beeb seek a second opinion by dragging Heather to a doctor, where with the help of a machine with a large, colour-coded screen, Heather learns that smoking reduces a baby’s oxygen supply. This shocking news causes Heather to break down, then and there, and she swears that she will quit for the sake of the tiny, innocent, defenceless human being gestating inside her. A week later she fails to show for her medical and the BBC are told she no longer wishes to continue filming.
Anyone thinking, however, that Heather would be first to go in a Weakest Link Nicotine Special - where the atmosphere is provided by three tramps with 200 grams of Golden Virginia and the host is played by a giant robotic cigarette (and you thought they’d have trouble finding a replacement with as much personality as Anne Robinson) - well, that person clearly hasn’t met Charlie.
Charlie is committed to the best possible life for her baby, but people keep trying to sabotage her plan by telling her to stop smoking. Don’t they realise that smoking while pregnant actually increases the strength of the baby’s heart? Yep, each Benson & Hedges is a like a miniature workout – and a cigar, well, that would be a full on spandex gym session! Baby’s gonna grow up to be an Olympic athlete! Well, I guess we now know what Usain Bolt’s mother was doing over in Jaimaca…
I await the next episode with bated breath (not as bated as Charlie's baby's, though).
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