Joe Lycett has addressed the fan scepticism after he welcomed a baby boy with his partner “Denise” earlier this month.
The comedian, 36, shared a sweet snap of him cradling his son in the park on Instagram on October 25 and said he was ”LOVING being a dad”.
Some fans thought the post was a “PR stunt” due to his history of pranks and joked that it looked like he was “holding a jacket potato”.
Lycett has now spoken out about the confusion, saying on the Parenting Hell podcast: “It's unexpected for me to have a baby because lots of people think of me as the gay bloke off the telly.”
He added that he is bisexual, after previously describing himself as pansexual, which means being attracted to someone regardless of their gender.
The Birmingham-born comic also reflected on his first few weeks of fatherhood, admitting he “did a lot of crying”.
“I've done a lot of, I mean less so now, but the first sort of two weeks I did a lot of crying because I did a lot of nostalgia for the future and imagined what he would be like when he was 20 and then worried about him when he's an old man and I can't be there for him,” he explained.
The Late Night With Lycett star said how “immensely proud” he is of his partner Denise, praising her for taking to motherhood like a “duck to water”.
He revealed in April that he was dating a woman whom he publicly calls Denise for privacy reasons.
Lycett added in the podcast that the couple have become regulars at their local “baby cinema” mornings and get parenting advice from YouTube and books.
The TV personality joked that one of the big advantages of becoming a father is being able to use his new tumble drier as he “loves washing”.
He also admitted they faced some difficulty when registering their baby’s name due to an old prank in which he changed his name to Hugo Boss to mock the fashion brand’s copyright battle with small businesses on using the word “boss” in their name.
“Talk about things coming back to bite you on the a***,” the Bafta-winning comedian said.
“When we went to register his name the registrar said to me 'have you been known by any other names?’ I said 'no' then I looked over at my partner and she furrowed her brow and I went, 'oh yeah, I was known as a Hugo Boss for a while.'
“And she had to go into real granular detail and she said, 'you got lucky because if you were Hugo Boss on your passport, we have to put that on his birth certificate the father is Joe Lycett also known as Hugo Boss'.
“Fortunately the passport was rejected because my signature as Hugo Boss when I was Hugo Boss for that period was a c*** and balls so they rejected it. It was just changed via Deed Poll.”
