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Say the words “cheeky chappy” and, for many, the first name that comes to mind is Danny Dyer. The star of The Football Factory and Human Traffic is the original of the 1990s geezer species – a Guy Ritchie movie made flesh, an episode of EastEnders (in which he inevitably became a fixture) shrunk down to a pint-sized portion. He is the alpha and omega of a particular cliché of British masculinity.
But he is also, at 45, a husband, father and grandparent navigating a world where the masculinity with which he grew up is often frowned upon. Or so we were told at the start of Danny Dyer: How to Be a Man, a watchable though frequently incoherent two-part inquiry into the trials of modern manhood in which the presenter traversed the nation on a quest to discover the truth about being a bloke in the 21st century.
Much like Dyer’s acting career, the results were likeable yet patchy and highly idiosyncratic. Dyer was well-intentioned and curious. You had to applaud the intuitive way he flinched from Neanderthal YouTuber Ed Matthews, who modelled himself on ghastly influencer Andrew Tate, and spouted gems such as “You got 25-year-olds now with no beards!”
For all his open-mindedness, there were moments, in last night’s second instalment especially, when Dyer seemed to be talking off the top of his head – trying to pass off unadorned gibberish as pearls of wisdom. “Since the ‘hashtag MeToo’ thing came in, it is confusing some men,” he declared at one point. “Sex is fundamental to men and women.”
He claimed, too, that young women are turned off by thoughtful and kind men and “always want the f**king arsehole” – a stereotype heated up and served straight from the microwave. He also occasionally teetered on full Alan Partridge. “I’m a lover not a fighter,” he declared at one point. “So I’ve come to Brighton, Britain’s most sexually liberated city.”
Dyer was in Brighton to meet Woody Cook, outgoing 23-year-old son of Norman Cook and Zoe Ball, who turned up at an award ceremony in 2021 in a full-length dress. He and Dyer visited a charity shop, where he tried on a rainbow jumpsuit. “It’s alright, isn’t it?” he declared. “The thing is, it’s very comfortable.”
Such clowning about sat alongside moments of insight and empathy. Dyer broke down in part one talking to a man whose former partner had killed their child. He was genuinely upset, too, when learning about the epidemic of suicide among men in the construction industry.
The actor had grown up in challenging circumstances, his father having left the family when Dyer was nine. Blinking away tears, Dyer recalled his dad telling him that his son – still a boy – was too old to hold his hand. “That killed me,” he said. “I’ve not carried that on with my own children.”
He may have adopted a gentler approach to parenting – but the paradox is that, even as fathers today change more nappies, the internet has become a cauldron of misogyny. No wonder young men are confused. On the one hand, they have a greater number of positive role models than ever before. On the other, there are dangerous idiots like Tate, who think gender relations have gone to pieces since the Middle Ages.
It’s a huge conundrum, which Dyer was never going to solve over two nights on Channel 4. He gave it his best shot, and there was no faulting his good intentions, but the geezer-with-a-heart-of-gold routine goes only so far and his innate Danny Dyer-ness was sometimes more obstacle than aid.
Dyer raised important questions about modern masculinity, but this muddled documentary did not furnish much by way of answers.
