TELEVISION
ROGER LEWIS
I’m told the best place to find a punch-up these days is at a funeral. There are so many step-siblings, former and future partners, in-laws and, no doubt, outlaws, at large these days, all bearing massive grudges, that, when they have to come together at the same time, at the grave of a person they nevertheless have in common, tempers flare, feuds are renewed, and nothing on earth can eradicate the ill feeling. Whatever counselling, education, tablets or psychiatric treatment can do, it can change nothing.
I wonder, therefore, what goes on behind the scenes in Long Lost Family? Maybe people aren’t always that thrilled to be reunited with the mothers and fathers who’d once dumped them in, say, Canada?
I’d certainly not thank you for making my Welsh relatives materialise in my lounge room. I distinctly remember thinking, when we buried my father in Lisvane 15 years ago, right, I never have to see or speak to any of you lot ever again as long as I live. I also recall Christopher Biggins, who used to co-host Surprise Surprise with Cilla, saying that, once the cameras were switched off, there was a lot of bad temper in evidence when estranged brothers and sisters were flown business class to the studio from, say, Calgary, to meet their counterparts who’d grown up in, say, Cheadle.
My wife, now deputy principal, child psychology services, East Sussex, disagrees with my caustic analysis. She loves Long Lost Family, and says that anyone who has given a child up for adoption, or has had an abortion, is traumatised for ever, and longs to find the vanished infant; pines for it; grieves.
It doesn’t help that, in addition to being a sceptical and cruel sod, I am also stupid. I didn’t know, in the episode I made myself watch, that Davina Mccall was following two separate stories. I was puzzled when a tearful fellow from Smethwick suddenly seemed to have acquired several half-sisters, most of them black.
It’s Davina’s obligatory group hugs that I’d hate most, especially as the location budget never runs to more than a carvery in a Harvester. But, yes, the programme is guaranteed to produce wet eyes.
And the East Sussex child psychologist to whom I have been married for 36 years is probably right that the cruelty of the adoption laws, keeping a person’s biological backgrounds a secret, only ensured that people grew up with an essential piece of their identity missing. Illegitimacy, like divorce, means nothing now – what a tremendous moral fuss was made about nothing; yet what a lifetime of nagging suffering was created.
As much as I appreciated Unforgotten, I kept forgetting where I was. There were so many characters – so many character actors employed – that one suspected a government scheme. Neil Morrissey, as a crooked insurance salesman, was fatally stabbed early on. James Fleet, in a big beard and living in a campervan, at first was a disgraced executive, fallen on hard times because his credit cards had been used to access paedo websites. Then he wasn’t any of those things, though the beard remained. Kevin Mcnally, very good as a bullying television presenter, like Hughie or Brucie, was still covering up, 20 years on, for the fact that his cross-dressing son had once run over a girl in a lane – except it transpired that the boy had hit a deer. All that agony for nothing.
All this, over six weeks, gave the cast a lot of opportunities for acting – long, exculpatory speeches in extreme closeup. These were men, we discovered, who’d lost everything, one way or
another; who were suffused with unnecessary guilt.
For the real culprit, the person who was unmasked in the final episode as a serial killer of teenage girls, was Alex Jennings, who here played a GP in a Georgian surgery, and not, as is usual with him, a member of the royal family. We knew he was a nasty piece of work, however, from the way, in his very first scene, Alex’s character was rude to a waitress about corked wine. Being unpleasant to waiters and waitresses, in my book, is a bigger crime than homicide. There is simply no excuse for it.
But what has happened to Nicola Walker, who now speaks with such mannered slowness I could go away and brew tea between her sentences? Her upper lip undulates as if it has a mind of its own and perhaps even has its own agent.
It reminded me of Frankie Howerd’s wig, which went up and down like a pedal bin.