Joe Lycett Suggests He Was Pushed To Announce He’d Become A Dad By The ‘Great British Press’

Joe Lycett has made good on his promise to appear on Josh Widdicombe and Rob Beckett’s parenting podcast now he’s become a dad.

Last month, the comedian revealed he’d recently welcomed a son, joking at the time: “I am LOVING being a dad but sadly I think this now means I can’t get out of going on Rob and Josh’s fucking podcast.”

“We will not be taking any press requests about this as we have already sold the rights to the first family picture to Autotrader,” he also quipped.

On Friday morning, the latest episode of Parenting Hell debuted online, with Joe opening up to his fellow comics about how he’s finding being a dad.

Revealing his “just over six-weeks-old” son is doing “very well”, the Late Night Lycett host shared: “[Living with a newborn is] somewhere between lockdown and a long-haul flight is what I think. And they’re two things that I enjoy, actually. I didn’t love lockdown for the obvious bad things, but I enjoyed the simplicity of it and I enjoy a long haul flight so it’s kind of fine.

“We try and do one thing a day, and the one thing might be going to the shop or going to see a friend. But it’s one thing, and that is enough.”

Joe also admitted a surprising result of being a dad was that he’s catching a surprising amount of sport on telly when waking up with his son in the early hours of the morning.

“The thing that has really surprised me is I’ve become really into sport,” he clamed.

“All the games are on between midnight and five in the morning, so when you’re up doing a feed there’s something live on. You feel like you’re part of the world.”

Because of the surprise nature of his announcement, and the fact that Joe is fond of a double-bluff publicity stunt, some fans were left speculating whether his baby news could actually be part of some wider plan.

He dismissed this in his newsletter earlier this month, insisting that the news is “defo not a stunt (although I appreciate I’ve cried wolf enough that might not be convincing)”.

“I was trying to work out what would the prank be? Because there’s always an end game. What would the point of it be?” he said.

“You could turn it into all sorts of things, but I do think it’s bold to pretend you’ve had a baby, isn’t it?”

In fact, Joe had hoped to make the announcement a lot later down the line, but was “encouraged” to share the news publicly by the “great British press”.

“We were very happy in our little sort of bubble and then it was sort of popped,” he lamented. “I wanted to talk about it when I’d worked out how to talk about it. And just live it.”

In October, Joe disclosed that he is in a long-term relationship with a partner known only as “Denise”.

“She’s not called Denise, but I don’t talk about her, because she has a job that she can’t be in the public eye,” he told the podcast The Pieces.

“I call her Denise because she hates the name Denise.”

Listen to Joe Lycett’s full interview on the new episode of Parenting Hell here.