Maybe Baby

Maybe Baby is an amusing, light-footed romantic comedy about Sam and Lucy Bell, an otherwise well-functioning couple whose marriage starts to wobble when they have no luck in having children.

Lucy starts fantasising about the sensitive heartthrob, the actor Carl Phipps, who is a client at the agency where she works. Sam is frustrated in his job at the BBC, where he has just got a new boss who knows all the smart new buzzwords but not much else. Sam wants to write his own screenplay, but goes off the rails when he starts writing a comedy about his and Lucy's childlessness. At last he has broken through his block, but he has just "forgotten" to tell Lucy about his project. Things get worse when he lifts passages from her diary to make the screenplay's female perspective more convincing.

What happens when Lucy realises what is really going on? And will all their efforts in bed and at the hospital bear fruit?

Maybe Baby sticks closely to the source novel, which the director and screenwriter Ben Elton also wrote. One suspects there is a certain autobiographical element in the depiction of Sam's writer's block and the intolerable conditions at the BBC. Even though the film deals with a serious subject, it is mostly played for laughs.