A lost son and a privileged glimpse of a father’s raw, unedited emotion LAST NIGHT’S TV Long Lost Family The Auction House
CALL The Midwife was never like this. When 14- year- old Susan discovered she was pregnant in 1962, her parents sent her to a Catholic institution in Scunthorpe, where she was to give birth and then give her baby away.
The schoolgirl mum was allowed to name her infant son. She called him Anthony, and for six weeks she nursed and cuddled him at the convent, telling the child how much she wanted to keep him.
That wasn’t permitted. Anthony’s adoption papers had already been signed and sealed. ‘In the end,’ Susan said, ‘the nuns got hold of the baby very roughly and just pulled him away. I can remember crying and crying.’ What makes Long Lost Family (ITV) such compelling viewing is its refusal to flinch. Susan’s story was neither over- dramatised nor romanticised. She simply set out her memories to presenter Davina McCall, while her husband Chris sat supportively beside her.
Chris was Anthony’s father. The couple had been teen sweethearts, who went on to marry and have five more children. A steel worker, he took an eminently practical view of the whole sad business: it wasn’t fair, but the heartache had fused them into an unbreakable pair.
And Anthony had found loving adoptive parents. Much good had come from it all.
So it was unexpected, and truly moving, that when Davina broke the news to this long-married couple — now living in Ontario, Canada — that their lost son had been found and wanted to meet them, it was Chris who broke down.
First he complained that his heart had dropped into his stomach. Then he began to weep. After a few seconds, he rushed from the room.
Long Lost Family exists for such moments, but wisely it does not exploit them. A more callous show would rerun the emotional collapses again and again in a highlights reel. Instead, it is much more touching to see them just the once, a privileged glimpse into the realms of other people’s most private emotions.
Chris appeared to recover pretty quickly. Swallowing hard and looking at a photo of his son, who was completely bald, he rubbed a hand over his own shiny pate.
‘I was kind of hoping he might have had some hair,’ he joked, ‘but I guess the curse goes on.’ That’s the British way. Emotions get let out only on the most special occasions.
Americans are different, especially wealthy ones. The Auction House (C4) was packed with them as it returned for a third series, and they were squealing with excitement at the goodies going under the hammer.
‘Oh, that is so vintage yummy!’ gasped Lili, who describes herself as a songwriter, as she surveyed a set of Sixties Minotti designer chairs at the Chelsea showroom.
To the uneducated eye, the Lots Road Auction House looks like a junk emporium, filled with tat — second-hand handbags, cheesy framed posters, sagging furniture and shabby animal-skin rugs.
But of course it can’t be tat, not at those prices. And as narrator Roger Allam kept reminding us, the Lots Road regulars are ‘Chelsea’s wealthy elite’.
The uneducated eye got a good look inside the homes of the elite, too. Amanda, another buyer with a transatlantic accent, lives in a former hunting lodge once owned by Henry VIII, though it probably wasn’t the Merry Monarch who shot the tiger splayed across her living-room floor.
‘You can see the bullet hole, a clean kill right through the neck,’ announced Amanda proudly, before pointing out her collection of stuffed swans.
Lili lives in a five- storey Georgian house crammed with ethnic eccentricities picked up at Lots Road, including African tribal masks and antelope skulls. She had managed to make the place look like a Zulu chieftain with a hoarding problem lived there.
In his Soho loft apartment, hairdresser Lee Stafford and his wife Jessica-Jane had mounted a huge pair of exotic antlers over the guest bed. ‘We call it the Horny Room,’ he explained.
Lee’s flat was filled with lumps of extravagant merchandise won at auction. ‘You can’t buy taste, can yer?’ he beamed. You certainly can’t, Lee.