TV Scope: Bringing Up Baby Channel 4, 9pm Tuesdays:
Claire Verity is the self-styled "Baby Guru". She charges £1,000 a day for her services and numbers the late Princess Diana, Mark Knopfler, Mick Jagger and Jack Nicholson as just some of the A-list celebrities who have entrusted their precious offspring to her method of child-rearing.
Quite why will be a mystery to many of the viewers of Bringing Up Baby, a new Channel 4 series which pits three methods of child-rearing from different decades against each other.
Verity believes in tough love with an emphasis on the tough more than the love. "Look at how small they are," she said, feeding a newborn baby at arm's length least it become too attached. "How can you let something so small rule your life?"
After just one episode of the four-part series, Verity is already a bona fide pantomime TV villain, a self-confessed Cruella de Vil of baby care. "I think I'm a complete bitch. Of course, I am, but what I do works," she says - her views on child-rearing have never been compromised by having a child herself.
What works for her is regular feeding at four-hour intervals, no eye contact during feeding, no more than 10 minutes of daily cuddling and long periods of solitude in the garden in all kinds of weather. She also believes babies should not be picked up when they cry. "Most of the time when a baby cries, they are tired or attention seeking. In both cases, ignore them," she says emphatically.
Verity is a disciple of a method of child-rearing, which was popular, needless to say, in the 1950s, and pioneered by Dr Frederic Truby King, a New Zealand doctor who first observed that calves who are subject to a strict routine thrive better than those who don't.
At the other extreme is the continuum concept based on an anthropological study of primitive tribes carried out in the 1970s. It involves round-the-clock skin-to-skin contact with baby in a sling for the first six months, home-birthing, breastfeeding and co-sleeping, and is definitely not for the time-pressed mother.
In the middle is the child-centred Dr Spock method which was novel when it first appeared in 1946, but now seems mainstream. "You can't love and cuddle a baby too much. There's no such thing," says its champion paediatric nurse Dreena Hamilton, a mother of three herself.
She is quite appalled by Verity's parent-centred views on child-rearing. "If you are going to have a baby, and if you are going to shut it out of your life for half of its day, what's the point of having it?" she asks Verity.
"People pay me to put the baby into a routine. At the end of the day, my babies are going from 7[pm] to 7[am] after 12 weeks. Are yours?" comes the haughty reply.
Expect more of the same over the next three weeks.
Review by Ronan McGreevy, journalist.