Danny Dyer: How to Be a Man, review: Britain’s premier geezer tackles the ‘war’ on masculinity

Part of Danny Dyer’s appeal, surely, is that you can’t quite take him seriously. He doesn’t quite take himself seriously – there’s often a twinkle in his eye when he doles out the requisite “geezer” soundbite – and programme makers love the irony. Hence the early scene in his two-part documentary, Danny Dyer: How to Be a Man (Channel 4), where Dyer showed us his beloved man cave… and the door handle fell off. He’s always one small step away from being the butt of a joke.

It’s both the making of How to Be a Man and its main weakness. The two episodes see Dyer travelling the country, exploring modern masculinity from schools to men’s refuges to boxing clubs to building sites. By now, we know the principle problem – it’s the fact that young boys think there’s anything whatsoever to be said for influencer berk Andrew Tate and his cock-eyed, cock-led definition of what men should and shouldn’t be. What’s undeniable is that Tate’s bid for attention (he was a contestant on Big Brother before he moved into cod social psychology) has worked: Dyer admitted that his own son, who is nine years old, thinks that Tate is a “total G”.

That was just one of the ways in which Dyer was precisely the right man for this job. In the course of the two hours he outlined several others – he comes from a working-class family where men were meant to be protectors and providers; his father upped and left when he was nine and their relationship up until that point is defined by the moment when Dyer’s dad told him they should no longer hold hands. Time to toughen up, son. (Dyer remembers it vividly; he is 45.)

In addition, his working life was initially defined by a series of tough-guy roles and the type of proper geezer persona that, we now know, many men use to conceal and repress emotional problems.

And men have a lot of emotional problems: the sheer number of suicides is a large part of the story here. Dyer tries, in his own chaotic way, to find out why, and though his conclusions are hardly earth-shattering, the point of the piece is to remind us that the questions he’s asking are vital. There were interviews in How to Be a Man, including one with a man whose abusive partner ended up murdering their child, that were immensely powerful.

These then, are very serious issues, and that brings us back to how seriously you can take Danny Dyer. I came away from How to Be a Man impressed, I must say. No, the scenes in which they dressed him up in a floral boiler suit to illustrate the importance of self-expression were probably not necessary. But when Danny was dumped in a room with men of every stripe he got them talking. That, as he recognised, is always the first step.

Both episodes of Danny Dyer: How to Be a Man are available on Channel 4 online now