Their marketing and merchandising ventures include a video, which has earned them an estimated pounds 5m, the launch of Channel 5, for which they were paid around pounds 500,000, and a pounds 1m marketing deal with Pepsi.Mr Williams has yet to name the new band, but Sony's involvement is evidence that this is a serious venture. Preeya, Prudence, Dawn and Lucy are the members of the latest girl band, an invention of Miller Williams, creative manager of Sony ATV Music Publishing. As he puts it: "Even if we had a fifth of the success that the Spice Girls have had, everyone will have a lot of fun out of it." But it's not just fun that he is after. They are young, attractive, feisty and female They were hand- picked to star in an all-girl band together.

Sound familiar? After the multi-million-pound success of the Spice Girls, someone was bound to try to repeat it. In that way, more of him is available to children than some younger men can afford to offer Older fathers, though harder to open up, have more to give.. He worries less about himself - and that means that he is free to be more aware of his children as they really are, and not just as projections of his own personality. The older father has usually learnt who he is and what he is worth. Day-to-day successes or failures in bringing up children may touch, but do not threaten, that self-valuation any more.It is easy to say that such a father simply cares less, but that is not true.

To fail to comfort a persistently crying small girl is to fail irrevocably as a human being. This injects anxiety, sometimes amounting to an almost desperate intensity, into the relationship with children, who are often quick to pick up and share the insecurity of the parent.But this passes away, with the years. It's a thought which can lead to panic and melancholy.I have been married twice, and I was young when my first children were born. Comparing the two families, I can see the big plus of late fatherhood, which is - put bluntly - that you fuss less.A young father and mother think that their very personalities are up for judgement. Moments when a parent appears to be enjoying some activity which requires the exclusion of children are there to be invaded.This is the normal friction of all young families.

But an older father - or mother, come to that - can become very resentful. It is not just that being suddenly pushed from behind, once a delightful shock which prompted clowning, now seems like a grave insult. It is the growing awareness that one's life ahead has become visibly limited, that this older parent will never in fact attain the state of post-children peace in which he or she can do "all those things I always meant to do". There are some fairly antique fathers who can perform on football pitches or bicycles almost as well as when they were in their forties Most fathers over 50, however, find such tasks hard going.

Most elderly or middle-aged men come to feel that they are somehow entitled to peace, quiet, a minimum of respect Children do not take this view Parents are there to be interrupted Routines are there to be subverted. Children are wonderfully forgiving about these defects, but there is always a residue of disappointment.A more insidious problem is that the mind grows less flexible. When children are a little older, they demand a tough father who can catch a small body launching itself suddenly down from a height, play football in the yard and be only mildly annoyed by a whack on the shinbone from a cricket bat.We all decay at different rates. There is no time to waste.With this go the physical drawbacks.