Rhod Gilbert: ‘Why I'm breaking the taboo around male fertility’

Rhod Gilbert has been talking for barely five minutes when he first mentions his sperm. There’s not enough of it, and what there is is “wonky, like shelving brackets” – a big problem if you want to have a baby. Which Gilbert, 52, desperately does, with his screenwriter wife Siân Harries, 39.

He is on a crusade to get men talking openly about their fertility, especially when they are struggling with it. “It’s such an embarrassing, taboo, stigmatised subject,” he says. “Men don’t want to talk about it.”

The stand-up comedian is calling from the basement kitchen of the couple’s London home to discuss his latest project, a BBC documentary called Rhod Gilbert: Stand Up to Infertility. But when talking about his own downstairs, he’s friendly but clearly nervous – very different to the cocky and deadpan persona he’s built over the past 15 years on comedy panel shows like Have I Got News for You, QI and Never Mind the Buzzcocks.

This latest programme is very personal to him. Gilbert and Harries got married in 2013 and started trying for a baby soon afterwards. After months of unsuccessful attempts, they sought medical help, and doctors focused their attention on Harries, assuming that her endometriosis must be the problem. She went through several rounds of IVF and ICSI – where sperm are injected into an egg – but nothing seemed to work.

In all this time, no doctor seriously considered that Gilbert’s sperm might be the problem. “Siân would always be the one sat next to [the doctor or nurse], and I sat next to her. The discussion was always with her,” he says. “Men are not the focus for the fertility industry at all.”

The only time that doctors addressed him was to give him some vague pointers on how to improve sperm quality by having a healthier lifestyle, so he gave up smoking. They also told him that he might have an intimate infection that could be an issue, but mentioned nothing about treatment, so Gilbert shrugged it off.

The first time Gilbert saw a male fertility specialist was during the filming of the show – six years after his wife first had treatment. The results of his visit were startling: “I find out that 98 per cent of my sperm are the wrong shape,” he says. “I had no idea that maybe only two per cent of my sperm are viable.”

Immediately, the andrologist suggested some simple treatments that could work, including a week’s worth of antibiotics for that infection, which could make all the difference to his fertility. “Those antibiotics make it more likely to conceive, less likely that Siân has a miscarriage, less likely we’ll need IVF,” he says. He describes the years of delay on such a simple treatment as “mind-boggling”.

This is typical of the treatment given to couples struggling to conceive. In more than half of cases, the man’s sperm is entirely or partially the problem, yet fertility is still seen as a “women’s issue”, and almost all resources are focused on putting them through costly, painful and pointless procedures. Gilbert says that this is a real blind spot in healthcare: in the UK, there are 2,000 gynaecologists, but only 200 andrologists. If you’re looking up the word “andrologist”, that may be telling in itself.

Gilbert says men are also worryingly unaware of their own ticking body clocks. “I unthinkingly went along with the view that Mick Jagger and Des O’Connor were banging out [children] in their 70s and 80s, so you can pretty much go on forever,” he says.

This, unfortunately, is not the case. The chances of getting your partner getting pregnant drop as men age, and the risk of miscarriage and pregnancy complications increases. And the effect is larger than you might think: a landmark study in 2003 found that it takes men over 45 five times longer to get their partner pregnant than men under 25.

This is particularly bad news when coupled with the fact that sperm counts halved between 1973 and 2011 in the West, and that sperm produced today is of far lower quality than before. The specific cause of this is not fully understood, but experts point fingers at unhealthy Western lifestyles, with sperm counts lower in those who smoke, are overweight or obese, inactive and have poor diets.

So, after all these years of treatments and heartbreak, and making a television programme about the importance of men talking about it, who has Gilbert turned to for support? “Not one single person in my life have I ever spoken to about it outside of this documentary,” he says.

He never even mentioned his and Harries’ difficulties conceiving to his mother Norma, who died in 2016, or his father Malcolm, who passed away in October.

He didn’t even tell his dad that he was making the documentary. And why not? “It’s embarrassing,” says Gilbert. He says that had his dad lived to see the documentary, both men would have tactfully ignored it when it came out. “I certainly wouldn’t bring it up... and I don’t know that he would have brought it up with me.”

Gilbert says his parents never asked when he and Harries might be having a child, or even if they wanted to have one, but says it would “certainly” have been different if he’d been their daughter instead of a son.

He has only mentioned that he’s making the documentary to one single friend. His friends and family might be therefore pretty shocked to find the show on the iPlayer on Monday, but Gilbert says that he “wouldn’t be surprised” if none of his male loved ones mention it to him. “Men haven’t got the tools to talk about stuff like this,” he says. “There might be girlfriends of our friends getting in touch, though.”

For Gilbert and many other men, the problem is that poor sperm seems to feel like an attack on their masculinity. “Your sperm count is attached to your manhood, it’s how hard you are, how tough you are,” he says. “And it’s so toxic.”

He’s even worried about getting abuse on the street from men who’ve seen the documentary. “I’m bracing myself for the shout-outs from cars and vans,” he says, sounding genuinely frightened.

So why did he make this documentary if he’s so mortified by the subject matter? Well, even if Gilbert hates talking about his own situation, he says he can see the value of men being more open in general.

When the pandemic is over, he plans to open support groups up and down the country for men experiencing fertility issues. He hopes to find a space in which he can talk at these groups, as well as helping others.

And Gilbert hopes that raising awareness of how common male infertility is will benefit wives and girlfriends, too. “Women are having round after round of IVF, when it could be the guy’s fault,” he says. “If we get men talking, it will benefit everyone.”

Read more: Genetic screening can pick up male infertility

Rhod Gilbert: Stand Up to Infertility is on BBC One Wales on Monday January 25 at 9pm and then BBC Two (in all of the UK) on January 31 at 9.45pm