A moving story of men who refused to feel ashamed
Drama-documentary – also known as factual drama – can be an awkward hybrid. Is its job to pretend or report, to show or to tell? Against the Law (BBC Two), a portrait of the quiet hero who helped bring about the legalisation of homosexuality, boldly strode across the chasm.
Several times the drama of Peter Wildeblood’s odyssey from closeted gay to the most influential homosexual in the British legal history was put on hold while men who lived through those dark times remembered the scarring trauma of living as pariahs.
Initially it looked like a glitch in which the background research material had stormed the citadel. Gradually the complementary roles of each half crystallised. There wasn’t much budget to play with – Brian Fillis’s script moved between woodpanelled rooms and the cold concrete of Wormwood Scrubs. The interviews helped backfill the landscape.
Wildeblood, for example, refused any humiliating so-called cures, but we heard from someone who did, and another who administered it. At times the two halves overlapped intriguingly. At one point the screen froze on David Robb playing Lord Wolfenden and cut to an interview with Roger, 89, who remembered having an affair with Wolfenden’s son at the time. Saucy.
Most of the action took place on the rubbery features of Daniel Mays, who can play cocky and cruel, but here wore the heartbreaking look of a schoolboy learning the vital skill of moral self-defence. Richard Gadd was a nuanced mix of nice but dim as Eddie Mcnally, the RAF corporal who gave evidence against his lover, while Mark Gatiss had a snippy little cameo as a prison psychiatrist. Both wore pitch-perfect little moustaches.
It could have included something on Wildeblood’s family, while the story of his mysterious friend Iris was too gnomic. The script was strong on the factions within the gay community, and the erasure of class divisions among homosexuals. But nothing was quite as moving as the interviews. Martin Gordon, 87, haunted by the life unlived and the truth not told, struggled to control his quivering lip. “It destroyed my personality,” said Stanley Underhill, 91. “I couldn’t be who I was. So I had nothing.” A tragedy in three sentences.
Hands up if you were a wringing wet dishcloth by the end of Long Lost Family (ITV)? One would very much prefer to sit through stories of heartache and redemption protected by a redoubtable force field of adamantine cynicism. But no. Either one’s age, or the age one lives in. Or both.
We Brits, formerly hard as nails, are nowadays a nation of sobbing softies, which is why Long Lost Family is back for a seventh series. It involves a Faustian pact into which participants seem content to enter. People who have been estranged from relatives, sometimes for whole lifetimes, are offered the chance of a reunion. The quid pro quo is the sacrifice of privacy. Television in all its might plays the part of search engine, and public confessional.
Not everyone can do the deal. In this episode, Cathie Cutler-evans learnt that her birth mother Adrienne had died but that she had two siblings. She met Anne and it was like two peas being reunited in a pod, but Cathie’s new brother Mark ducked out of relentless prime-time scrutiny, confining his appearance to a family snap at the end.
In every good story there has to be a villain, and the villain here was the past, where they do things differently. How cruel it can be. Marion Williams broke down as she remembered being forced, in 1964, to give up her baby boy both by the council and her grandparents, each equally unforgiving. And yet these seismic events bring out the best in people. Marion’s son Simon, now over 50, far from blaming his birth parents, was generously delighted to learn that they had supported each other through such a wrenching event.
The stories are so robustly authentic that they required no editorial tweaking. A little mood music acted like a gentle hand on the tiller. Nicky Campbell as ever had a pleasant bedside manner while Davina Mccall is a latter-day Wendy Darling, mother to the nation’s lost boys and girls. The look on her face coos hashtag so proud. Watching other people cry for entertainment should feel slightly soiling, but Long Lost Family offers cathartic balm in a world of psychic stress.
Against the Law Long Lost Family