SCREENWRITER

Fewer deadbeat dads please, writes Donald Clarke

I have just missed my infant son's sports day. I arrive home to find the unfortunate tyke peering pathetically out the window at me. "You promised Dad!" he wails, before storming theatrically towards his bedroom. Throughout this my wife, a woman whose personality is defined by her interactions with me and the fuming child, wears an expression of resigned misery. "Don't look at me like that," I bellow. "You know I've been slaving on the Denver account all week. If I pull this off

I get the VP spot."

Golly, I really have lost all sense of priorities. If I don't shape up soon I am going to miss little Corey's entire childhood. Never fear. Some comic catastrophe - supernatural in origin, as likely as not - is about to engulf the family and, by confronting me with the ultimate consequences of domestic neglect, redirect my energies towards the egg-and-spoon race.

Who am I? Robin Williams, Jim Carrey, Steve Carrell, Martin Lawrence and, especially, Mr Tim Allen. A list of all the films whose protagonist encounters this trauma could fill this entire supplement. Liar, Liar, The Shaggy Dog, Daddy Day Care, The Santa Clause, Hook, RV: the poisonous stench of paternal guilt streams off that unhappy catalogue. In two weeks time Steve Carrell will play yet another father with no time for fatherhood in Evan Almighty.

What is going on here? The personal experiences of the men who commission these films are, surely, of significance here. You don't get to be a Hollywood producer without drawing on significant wells of blind ambition.

The children of Hiram B Mogul will, most likely, spend as much time weeping in the divorce courts as they will perched happily on Mogul Sr's powerful shoulders. Making Poppa Penguin III (Tim Allen gets real after being transformed into an arctic seabird) is, for Hiram, a gesture of apology towards the son now holidaying in Maui with a less self-absorbed stepfather.

Mind you, a significant portion of these men were raised in the 1970s, the decade in which divorce became America's national sport. Perhaps they identify more with the weeping children than the thrusting adult. They may be taking (terrible) revenge on an absent parent by reimagining him as a hideous amalgam of Tim Allen and a lizard.

One is bound to wonder for whom these stories are intended. Divorced fathers desperately trying to fill their weekly appointment with Junior may very well find Mr Allen's plight unimaginably poignant.

Most of the best children's stories ditch the parents as soon as possible. Harry Potter heads off to Hogwarts. The heroes of The Railway Children enjoy trains while dad languishes in prison. The posh youngsters in the Narnia books flee bombed London for the country. Swallows and Amazons happens far from the gaze of adults. And so on. Only when liberated from parental influence do the young heroes properly thrive.

Save the expressions of guilt for your analyst, Hiram. The kids just want to have fun.

dclarke@irish-times.ie