Why winning Nicky’s family lottery leaves the rest of us wanting more

The chances of winning tonight’s euro lottery jackpot are one in 140 million. But you might think that’s a more likely outcome than the improbable sequence of events experienced by a chap called John, from Fareham near Portsmouth.

he was minding his own business at home one day when he got a call — ‘completely out of the blue,’ as he said — from Nicky Campbell on Long Lost Family (ITV).

Nicky explained that John’s foster sister, Kate, was looking for him. It had been almost 50 years since they last saw each other — a tough half-a-century for John. While Kate was adopted, he grew up in a series of harsh children’s homes.

‘Did anyone love you?’ Nicky asked. ‘Dunno,’ John replied, in a voice loaded with resignation and regret. ‘It’d be nice to be part of a family. Shame, really. Life could have been so much better.’

he added that he thought he had a half-sister somewhere, called Susan — and Nicky offered to try to find her too.

This is the Long Lost Family mission, after all. But that doesn’t mean it’s easy. The search for John took more than a year, hampered because he’d changed his surname by deed poll.

In the end, researchers tracked him down by contacting everyone who shared his first name, his middle initial and his birthday.

That alone would make a remarkable story, but the team also found his older sister, Sue. Recovering from the shock that he was longing to meet her, she said: ‘I’ll try and love him, if he wants me to.’

More extraordinary still, Kate was also united with her own older sister, Becky, whom she had never met — even though they both lived in Portsmouth.

‘Part of me can’t believe that something so brilliant is happening,’ she said, as she learned that Becky has four adult daughters, now Kate’s nieces.

When such an exhaustive effort has been made to bring these families together, it’s a pity that the show’s format give so little information about their new lives – just a card and a caption at the end of the hour.

This shouldn’t be like those property shows where we watch couples wrestling with a choice of three holiday villas in Spain... only to find out at the end that, after the cameras went away, the deal fell through.

Long Lost Family wrings out our emotions so thoroughly, we deserve a little more reward than that. Longer updates, please.

We have a right as well to expect more than is delivered by Jerk (BBC1), a sitcom about a workshy, sarcastic cynic with cerebral palsy. Written by and starring Tim Renkow, the back-to-back episodes were as lazy as the central character.

One gag had Tim being helped across the road by a well-meaning passerby when he didn’t want to go — a joke that was weary when Dick emery did it in the Seventies. Tim signs on as a student, just so he can get drugs. he joins a gym and tries pilates — and we’re meant to laugh when he wobbles over.

Sopranos fans will want to watch, to see Lorraine Bracco (who played Tony Soprano’s psychotherapist) as Tim’s foulmouthed mother.

Co-star Sharon Rooney is good, as she so often is, playing Tim’s bossy girlfriend with a streak of menace.

There’s the core of a great idea here, poking fun at the sort of people who panic when they meet anyone with a serious disability. But a subject so sensitive needs clever, imaginative writing — not pratfalls and sight gags about walking frames.