Whether you’re a parent or not, the home working/childcare juggle is familiar to everyone who has spent the past few months watching colleagues’ children burst in on conference calls. Yet, it still feels like TV gold every time we see someone’s offspring bound into a room while a parent is in the middle of a live broadcast. Yesterday we were blessed with this on two occasions.
Dr Clare Wenham, an assistant professor of global health policy at the London School of Economics, was speaking to BBC news about local lockdowns when her four-year-old daughter Scarlett burst in and unwittingly stole the show. She climbed onto her desk, waved her artwork and started talking about unicorns. Clare, who is from south London, tells Grazia she couldn’t believe it after she hung up.
‘I was a bit speechless and a bit like, “oh my God”. And then when it got on the Guardian and the Daily Mail we [she and her husband] found it all quite funny,’ she says.
The video has since gone viral, garnering millions of views on social media. She certainly wasn’t expecting it to get picked up so much. ‘I thought, well who watches TV at 4.30pm? Most people have jobs. But obviously when it goes viral you don’t need to be on TV at a particular time of day,' she adds.
We all remember the priceless footage of North Korea correspondent Prof Robert E Kelly’s two children storming into his study while he was mid-interview in 2017, and his wife frantically running in to retrieve them seconds later. Has anyone asked Clare where her partner was?
‘He was also working at the same time and no one's asked me because I think it's very different to that stuff with Robert Kelly because we weren't in lockdown then,’ she says.
‘We weren't all working from home. He was in a home office and that’s different to now. At the moment, everyone's at home. Whether you're a single parent or a two parent household, it's become a lot more normalised. So I think it resonates because anyone who's working in a job which has these Skype or Zoom calls has probably been worried about similar things.’
The messages I have seen are all “thanks for normalising it” and messages like that from my employer too.
Although lockdown means the circumstances are very different to Prof Kelly’s experience it’s interesting that the question of where her partner was has not come up. Would this be the case if she had been a man, or do we still assume it’s a woman’s role to take care of children?
‘I'm not the one asking the questions and my husband does plenty of stuff around the house, so I don't know,’ she says.
Even so, the messages she has received since going viral will no doubt be a far cry from anything a man has to put up with: she’s had a number of people getting in touch on Twitter to ask if she is single.
‘I’m a bit like “Really? Really? Is that where we’re at?’ A. It’s weird. B. Is a mother of small children really something that people are interested in? And C. Come on, can we not move beyond thinking about sex?', she says.
She’s barely engaged with it, she explains. ‘I don’t really want to deal with this crap. I’ve got my job to do… it’s not something I expected. I’ve actually been really overwhelmed with how kind people have been. The messages I have seen are all “thanks for normalising it” and messages like that from my employer too.’
It’s true that we’re all blending our home and work lives at the moment and yet we still seem so delightfully shocked when we see the same situation play out on the news.
‘The more times we see it hopefully the more times employers will be like, “Oh, hang on, people have lives.” People can't always answer a call at exactly the time that you want to call them. What lockdown has shown us is we’re moving away from that nine to five in the office setup and that people can do their work at times or places that suits them, and I think that's a positive. It might not work for everyone, some people might like going to the office, but if you don't and you're happy to work around your private life then that's fine.’
She admits she hasn’t had time to think about it in much detail yet in the 24 hours since she went viral, but she does hope to see it normalised more.
‘It’s inevitable and people need to recognise that and incorporate it into how they’re working,’ she adds.
On how she and her husband have found working from home with two young children during lockdown (she also has a two-year-old), she says: ‘I don't think you can diminish the fact that it's been nice to have more time with your kids. But it is also not stress free.’
Clare wasn’t the only one interrupted while being interviewed on live television yesterday. Half an hour later on Sky News, the channel’s foreign affairs editor, Deborah Haynes, was disturbed by her son making an impromptu appearance and asking for two biscuits. With Clare, though, BBC anchorman Christian Fraser engaged with Scarlett and laughed along. However, Sky New’s anchorman Mark Austin was criticised after he looked unimpressed by the interruption and cut the interview short.
What does Clare think of the difference in reactions?
‘Decisions are made in a split second and maybe a different producer on each of those shows would have handled it differently again. The way the BBC handled it was great and it was engaged rather than try and hide it. Just because it was during an interview it is getting headlines, right? This happens to people every day in their normal routine meetings.’
She says it's fine if you're happy to share it, but that some people might not want to and that is a different question.
‘I'm relaxed,’ she explains. ‘It was kind of a bit too late. You know, by the time I really thought about it it was done.’
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