TV Scope My Fake Baby Channel 4, Wednesday, January 2nd, 9pmLots of little girls should now be playing happily with baby dolls, courtesy of Santa. What, however, are we to make of mature adult women who are still playing with dolls, albeit very expensive ones known as "reborns" who look and behave like living babies?
This documentary explored this bizarre new industry, in which dolls, which are indistinguishable from real babies, are customised to customer specifications. In what looks like a sci-fi vision of a dystopian future, they come complete with raised capillaries, birthmarks, milk spots, and can be warm, breathing and wiggling.
We met Sue and Christine, two customers, or rather "adoptive mothers", as they were referred to in the tongue-in-cheek voiceover.
Sue, who looked like an overgrown Barbie doll herself, with her beribboned curls, had left it too late to have real children as she and her husband were having "too much fun".
Instead, in her spookily beautifully kitted out nursery, she cuddled, washed and dressed her four reborns in designer clothes, before wheeling them out for walks in designer prams.
Christine was a grandmother, and a new adoptive mother, who felt that a reborn would help her cope with the loss of her grandson Harry. She had the reborn made as a replica of Harry as a baby, right down to facial markings and moles. It only emerged late on in the programme that Harry was not in fact dead, but had gone to live in New Zealand. Christine was devastated, as after looking after him as a baby, she had, she stated, "felt as if he were mine". Her emotional response, "no one will be able to take him away from me this time" when reborn Harry was "delivered", was really disturbing.
However, Sue's tenuous grip on reality was even more disturbing when she travelled to Washington to collect Sophie, the latest reborn addition to her family. After spending two days "bonding" (her words), she was distraught to discover that Sophie had a crack and, of course, as she was not perfect, had to be sent back.
The only notes of reality in this weird world of grotesques came from Christine's husband, Arn, and grandson, Harry. Arn punctured her elation. "I don't like it Christine," was his response to reborn Harry. "It makes me think of something on a mortuary slab". When Christine shows her fake Harry to the real Harry via webcam, and insists it is a baby and not a doll, Harry, with the blunt honesty of a child, calls her a "numbskull".
While these freakish baby substitutes obviously met some needs for Sue and Christine, it is difficult to think of them as a harmless hobby when the boundaries between fantasy and reality become so blurred. There must be a healthier outlet for their energies than cooing over inanimate rubber dolls.
The last word was left with Elvis in the accompanying soundtrack: "My one and only prayer is that one day you'll care . . . But it's all only make believe."