Long Lost Family
Continues Monday 2 August, 9pm ITV and ITV Hub
It’s now a decade since viewers first saw Long Lost Family. Its pitch remains deceptively straightforward. Here is a show where researchers help out those who want to find relations – relations whom they have frequently never even met, despite in some cases searching for years.
So why has the programme been such an enduring success? In great part, it’s about the care with which the production team go about their work. As with Who Do You Think You Are?, also made by production company Wall to Wall, Long Lost Family offers historical and social context in order to help viewers understand the complexities behind what are sometimes challenging and heartbreaking family stories.
Then there’s the emotional support offered to those who take part. It’s perhaps telling that its hosts, Nicky Campbell and Davina McCall, both featured in episodes of Who Do You Think You Are? that revealed tangled family histories. Campbell’s episode, for example, showed him tracing Scottish roots via his adoptive family rather than focusing on the Irish family of his birth parents, a reflection in part of how the presenter thinks of himself as Scottish.
The 11th series will feature 10 episodes and, to judge by the ones that are already available via ITV Hub, there should be some extraordinary moments. The first episode, for example, focused in part on Dominic Matteo, a former Premier League footballer who played for such teams as Liverpool, Leeds United and Blackburn Rovers. In November 2019, Matteo underwent surgery for a brain tumour, from which he has now fully recovered. “I was just thinking about meeting my birth mother,” Matteo says, explaining how his health scare changed his outlook – and his priorities. “When you’re close to your life being over, it becomes more important.”
The series also features the oldest-ever person to search for a relative, an 86-yearold who wants to find his daughter, and the show’s first-ever search for a foster brother.