FANCY A WEEPIE?

If you think Long Lost Family is emotional, wait till you see Nicky Campbell and Davina McCall’s follow-up series that shows what happened next...

Nicky Campbell is normally the stoical face of ITV’s heartstring-tugging series Long Lost Family. He’s the man who delivers extraordinary news to ordinary people about long-lost relatives in a calm and measured way, allowing them to show the emotion. But Nicky’s mask slips in this week’s Long Lost Family: What Happened Next, the first in a three-part series that updates the stories of some of the show’s most poignant subjects.

Faced with disturbing revelations on a trip to New Zealand to meet John Williams and his sister Noreen, Nicky buries his face in his hands. ‘This was a tough search, not only because they were hard to track down,’ says Nicky. ‘What happened to them as children was truly awful.’

In What Happened Next, Nicky and co-host Davina McCall find out how relationships have developed between the people they’ve reunited – and reveal some emotional new twists. ‘The reunion is just the beginning,’ says Nicky. ‘This series asks how easy it is to build a relationship after a lifetime apart.’

The trip to meet John and Noreen stems from the Long Lost Family story of Ron Williams and his sister Christine, in 2015. Separated when Ron was six and Christine four and living in Wales, they were brought together for the first time in 64 years. But a mystery remained. As Davina explains, ‘Both had a recollection of their mother having two more children, and Christine’s adoptive mother told her she had a sister. But that was all they knew.’

The one clear link to a sibling was the doll Christine had been given when she was adopted. ‘I was asked what I wanted to call it and the name Eluned came out straight away,’ remembers Christine. ‘That’s the Welsh name for Lynn.’

Research reveals Lynn was the middle name of Ron and Christine’s halfsister Noreen, who lives in Australia, while her brother John is in New Zealand. ‘We discover John and Noreen suffered horribly when they went to live with their father and stepmother in London,’ says Nicky. ‘John recalls how they had to pick up food in the street to survive. And they were beaten.’ But there’s a happy ending, as John and Noreen enjoy an emotional meeting with Ron and Christine. ‘This is wonderful,’ says John. ‘For 60 years we knew there were people missing from our lives and now we’ve found them.’

The first episode also revisits a story from 2016, the first meeting of Cliff Jardine and half-sister Sue, who’d both been put up for adoption as infants. Cliff

revealed in Long Lost Family how he’d been starved of affection by his adoptive parents. Now he’s found happiness, saying, ‘Sue and I just clicked; I can’t imagine life without her.’

Not all the stories are successes. ‘Painful truths can be laid bare by reunions,’ says Davina. ‘It can be a challenging time for the people involved.’

But next week, we catch up with another happy reunited family – Chris- tine Gillard and daughter Margo, who Christine, then 18, gave up as a baby because she couldn’t look after her. They now speak every day. ‘I can’t imagine not having that phone call from Mum,’ says Margo. ‘Even my dog knows the phone is going to ring at 9pm every night!’ Long Lost Family: What Happened Next, Tuesday, 9pm, ITV.