Given some of Michael Whitehall’s parenting strategies, he’s unlikely to be asked to offer tips to a guidebook any time soon. ‘Didn’t you Sellotape me into a nappy once?’ his son, the comedian Jack, asks him. Michael did indeed – more than once in fact – and he’s completely unrepentant about it. ‘It was only because of what was going on down there,’ he insists. ‘Your explosive nappies were unbelievable.’ ‘Incidentally, the Sellotape method is the same one I use on Michael now – just over his mouth,’ interjects Jack, who always refers to his dad by his name. ‘It’s very effective.’ Anyone who’s watched the hit Netflix series Travels With My Father will recognise this affectionately teasing dynamic between Whitehalls Senior and Junior. Over the course of five seasons the pair have travelled the world together, encountering situations in turn funny and awkward and ribbing each other along the way. The final series, broadcast three years ago, saw them on home turf, and who knows, there may yet be more to come. In the meantime, though, circumstances have changed. Jack, 36, recently became a father himself when his girlfriend, model Roxy Horner, 33, gave birth to their daughter Elsie last September. As an apprehensive Jack prepared himself for the big event, it occurred to him that here was, in effect, another journey he could take with his dad, albeit a slightly more metaphorical one. Which brings us to Fatherhood With My Father, a new Netflix series in which the Whitehalls go on a globe-trotting trip to find answers to the big questions facing the comedian in the lead-up to becoming a dad. That means everything from trying on ‘empathy bellies’ to replicate the feelings a woman has during pregnancy, to attending birth classes and flying to LA to look at some of the wacky ways our friends across the Atlantic prepare for parenthood. Needless to say, Michael looks baffled throughout. ‘He looked like a chimp trying to get peanut butter out of a jar,’ he remarks after watching Jack, his eldest son, being instructed on how to engage in a particular sort of intimate massage on a plastic model. The duo also look at whether driverless cars might enable Jack to avoid ever taking his driving test – all underpinned by the duo’s trademark gentle ribbing and Michael’s brilliantly withering asides. Father and son clearly had a hoot. ‘We’d always talked about trying to work together again in the future once we’d finished Travels, because we loved doing that,’ says Jack. ‘And we felt this was a really interesting topic, but also one with a bit more purpose as it was something that was actually happening in my life.’ And has since happened, of course: while Jack can be seen fretting in the show that he can’t keep a basil plant alive, never mind a human being, here he is, father to a near one-year-old, having clearly taken to fatherhood like a duck to water. ‘It’s an incredible experience that’s constantly evolving,’ he beams. ‘We were just on holiday and in the course of one week she became a toddler; she just wants to grab and destroy everything and she’s eating with her hands. And she began crawling – all in a week. Every stage has new challenges, but it’s all amazing.’ Elsie was born at St Mary’s Hospital in London, where Princes George and Louis and Princess Charlotte all came into the world, and Jack says he and Roxy had planned to do the ‘Prince William and Kate’ picture on the steps of the hospital as they emerged once Roxy had given birth. ‘But we were knackered, and Roxy had to put on her make-up and I was in a tracksuit I’d worn for three days, so it was probably not the time,’ he says. ‘A couple of weeks later I thought we could go back and do the photo with a full glam squad, but it felt maybe a little bit too much.’ Beside him Michael rolls his eyes, but make no mistake he’s besotted with the new arrival, who joins the two grandchildren he already has courtesy of Jack’s sister Molly. ‘It feels just as good each time,’ he says. ‘She has the Whitehall blue eyes that both Jack and I have. The fact I can’t see out of them doesn’t matter.’ In fact, Michael is very sprightly for a man of 84, but says he thinks Jack felt compelled to reproduce in a nod to his advancing years. ‘I think Jack thought, “Daddy’s going a bit gaga, I’d better give him my grandchild to join the club.” So he surprised us all and produced this beautiful child.’ ‘He’s very sweet as a grandfather,’ Jack confides. ‘It hasn’t necessarily always shown on camera but he does have a softer, more affectionate side.’ That’s evident from the new series, which shows heartwarming home videos of Michael clowning around with his first-born. Nonetheless, Michael is the first to admit he wasn’t the most hands-on dad to Jack, Molly and younger brother Barnaby, leaving most of the work to their mum Hilary, 63, his wife of 38 years. ‘I was lucky to have the current Mrs Whitehall on parade at all times – I call her the current Mrs Whitehall to keep her on her toes – she did virtually everything,’ he says. ‘I did the jokes and the dancing, but she did all the hard work. I was never into babies, but I did my best.’ Times have changed, and like most modern dads Jack is resolutely hands-on, even at 5am. ‘I feared that as I got older I’d find that element of it quite challenging,’ he says. ‘I’d never been a morning person, but when you have a baby you’ve got no choice.’ Michael adds, ‘He just gets on with it beautifully, with love and elegance and no complaints. Everything his father didn’t have.’ Goodness, this is a turn-up – father and son being publicly lovely about each other – though normal service quickly resumes. Jack jokes that hanging out with his father helped him prepare for fatherhood. ‘You’re only ever one restaurant trip away from a tantrum, all stairs are a potential hazard and you have to constantly think about temperature, so there are definitely a lot of lessons I’ve learnt in my time travelling with Michael.’ Michael gets his own back by reminding his first-born of his masterclass in projectile vomiting. ‘If there was an Olympic medal for that, Jack would win it,’ he says. What about parenting bloopers? Did Michael ever leave Jack in a supermarket? Not quite. ‘He did leave me in a boarding school for ten years,’ Jack quips. ‘He dropped me off at the gates and then remembered ten years later.’ ‘He always says I sent him away to boarding school when he was six, which is a blatant lie,’ says Michael. ‘I had good reason to send him away to boarding school when he was six but he was too young, so I had to wait until he was nearly nine and by then it was almost too late.’ Jack also recalls going on a family holiday with friends, when the mums went shopping leaving Michael and two other dads supervising the children in the swimming pool. ‘Michael turned to his friend and said, “You know what’s funny is I can’t actually swim.” And then his friend said, “Oh, I can’t either.” As did the third guy. Luckily the mums had realised and were already on their way back.’ Still, Jack can’t talk given that, as we’ve seen, he still hasn’t learned to drive despite Michael giving him lessons. He stopped because his son ‘just couldn’t get the hang of anything to do with it’. ‘One of the episodes in the series is about technology, and how it can help us become better parents in the future,’ explains Jack. ‘The whole episode is basically me trying to vouch for the fact that I can’t drive. We use a driverless car and a jetpack and various other ways of getting around me needing to ever learn to drive, because I was hoping technology would render that obsolete. Sadly it doesn’t, so I have to face facts.’ Jack’s dealing with another challenge in the form of confronting the fact that his parents’ social life is now more hectic than his own. ‘I’m there changing nappies, making milk, doing all of the hardcore dad stuff, and Hilary and Michael are at the Chelsea Flower Show, cool -premieres, weekends away – it’s non-stop,’ he says. ‘Adjusting to them having a far more active social life than mine is bewildering.’ He recalls that while he was recently filming a new thriller in Greece, his parents were enjoying a ‘jolly’ with their great friend Julian Fellowes in Mykonos, although they did stop off to see him en route. ‘So they were over in Mykonos having what sounded like a sort of geriatric version of Love Island, partying round the pool every day, and I was working my socks off and they just dipped in to see me,’ he says. The filming was for Malice, a psychological thriller for Amazon Prime Video in which he stars alongside David Duchovny, playing what he describes as a sort of ‘sociopathic nanny’ with a vendetta against the family he’s infiltrated. It’s a departure from his previous TV and film roles, which have mainly been rooted in comedy, and he’s very grateful. ‘It’s very hard to get people to consider you as anything other than what you’re known for. You get typecast quickly and it’s been a bit of a journey to find a project like this, which is very different from anything I’ve done before.’ It’s little surprise he ran it past his father, an ex-theatrical agent and production company founder who’s represented the likes of Edward Fox, Colin Firth and Judi Dench and still has a keen showbusiness brain. ‘I always send Michael scripts for things I’ve been offered. He has this adage that a career is defined as much by the dodgy stuff and the stuff you say no to as the good work you do, so he’s a great filter. But he read this script and thought it was brilliant.’ The timing was bittersweet, given he was having to juggle what he describes as ‘a very intense and challenging shoot’ with having a newborn baby. ‘It was a bit of a balancing act, but it was fantastic and an amazing creative team. David Duchovny is very wise, a really interesting person to spend time with,’ he says. ‘Roxy was able to come out with Elsie for a while and that was lovely.’ He laughs as he recalls an uncomfortable moment towards the end of filming when he and Roxy started to discuss hiring a nanny themselves. ‘I was going to work every day playing this absolute lunatic, then coming home and interviewing nannies. I was so thorough with my questioning, wanting to do every check possible, and Roxy was like, “I think you can calm down a bit.”’ If only Michael had been involved in the interview process, that could have been another TV series. Happily for their fans, the pair haven’t ruled out doing something else together in the future. ‘You never know,’ says Jack. ‘It’s such a joy to get to spend time with each other that it never really feels like we’re working. So if the opportunity arose we’d definitely like to do something else.’ Jack Whitehall: Fatherhood With My Father, from 10 September, Netflix.
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