Brian & Arthur’s Very Modern Family (RTÉ One, 9.35pm) is two documentaries in one. The first is in the genre of “celebrity does something interesting” as former Big Brother winner Brian Dowling and choreographer and Dancing With The Stars judge Arthur Gourounlian chronicle their journey to parenthood.
But hiding in plain sight is a second film exploring a uniquely Irish dysfunction. Because when it comes to surrogacy – which is how the married couple are to have their daughter – the legislation here is a never-never land with few certainties and much guesswork.
Dowling will be familiar to Irish viewers from having won Big Brother while working as a Ryanair flight attendant. However, the more interesting story is arguably that of Gourounlian, who fled Armenia with his family as a child amid war with Azerbaijan. Seeking asylum in Belgium, his father was handed a razor: all the refugees had to shave their kids’ heads. “Maybe that’s why I’m obsessed with my hair,” Gourounlian says.
Ireland in 2023 likes to think of itself as liberal. Yet when Dowling and Gourounlian reveal they are to have a child by donor egg – and that Dowling’s sister Aoife is the surrogate – they are bombarded with vitriol. One stranger accuses them of a “black heart”; another says that their announcement “made no mention at all of the woman”.
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“What is it about our existence that sickens you so much?” wonders Dowling. “Why is it that you are entitled to have a family and I’m not?”
Some information the couple keep to themselves. We don’t know who is the biological father – or where in Europe they and Aoife go for the IVF procedure. However, the documentary makes it plain that surrogacy is not a trivial undertaking. “The closer it gets the more emotional I am,” Aoife says. “My hormones are all over the place.”
It’s a moving story – yet, at one level, of a muchness with the sort of soft-focused celebrity fluff you might stumble upon on Channel 4. Where it differs is when we get into Irish law. Or, more accurately, the absence of Irish law.
Legally, as the woman giving birth to the child, Aoife is the only one with guardianship rights: in the hospital, she must sign documents so that Brian and Arthur can care for the baby. And that’s just the start of the steps that must be taken so that the couple have any sort of agency regarding their daughter. Until then, says their lawyer, “neither of you has a legal relationship with the child”.
The film ends with Dowling holding the baby just as she has dropped a stink-bomb. There are lots of odours – but not a whiff of glamour. Then, isn’t that the point? For Dowling and Gourounlian domestic banality was the dream they’d been chasing all along.
