Is it really suitable to televise this heartbreaking moment?
A typically emotional journey of highs and hard-to-watch heartbreak kicked off a seventh series of Long Lost Family: Born Without Trace (ITV1), which set Davina McCall and Nicky Campbell on the identity trail of two more foundlings. One, Simon Prothero, was left in an outside toilet block in Neath. The other, Lisa Dyke, was found in a car park in another child's pram outside a health clinic. They came to the LLF team to find out what happened.
Both of their paths to finding out who left them and why were copybook Long Lost Family, which is to say, extremely moving throughout. I clocked the LLF TTT (Long Lost Family Time to Tears) at 3 minutes and 41 seconds, and I was welling up not long afterwards. Even for this most lachrymose of series, this is a resplendent triumph.
If that sounds soulless and cynical, remember that this is commercial television that, for its success, relies on fomenting, through DNA testing, hugely sensitive situations and then filming the outcome to transfer those emotions to the empathetic viewer. Of course, the aim is to help your Simons and your Lisas to find out 'who they are', in the common coinage. But that's not the only aim.
Long Lost Family does tread very carefully, which is to its credit. Difficult news is broken to its subjects off-camera. The meetings with newfound family are filmed in good taste and with minimal American-style schmaltz.
On the other hand, television is always manipulative. Is it fair, for example, in the case of Simon here, to find his birth mother and then have to tell him that she didn't want to be contacted? Might that not make Simon feel lost and unwanted a second time over?
To these jaded eyes, it makes Long Lost Family slightly queezy viewing. The great DNA revolution, with home testing and the concomitant genealogy boom, has undoubtedly helped lots of people to find out who they are. But it comes with side effects, too. Lots of people have found things out that, on reflection, it might have been better not to have known, and that now can't be un-known. Whatever your position, it certainly shouldn't be television producers influencing these genuinely life-altering choices.
What was particularly fascinating in this episode was Simon's admitting that it was watching old series of Long Lost Family: Born Without Trace that inspired him to apply to the programme and dig up his own history in the first place. There's a cultural genealogy to television, too, one in which over time the things we watch affect how we behave. It's probably too early to tell whether the repeated posing of the question, 'Who do you think you are?' and the ability to find out on camera in the presence of Davina McCall and Nicky Campbell, has been an unmitigated good. Simon would be worth asking, but we never got that far.
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