CHRISTOPHER STEVENS reviews: Long Lost Family: Born Without Trace: Davina's DNA search show's been left behind by the march of science
Science that seemed miraculous a few years ago is now commonplace.
We would be disappointed if a complex paternity riddle couldn't be solved with a single DNA swab.
Long Lost Family: Born Without Trace is now in its seventh series, helping people abandoned at birth to find out who their real parents were.
And even presenters Nicky Campbell and Davina McCall no longer appear surprised when a five-minute genetic test matches an adoptee with blood relatives they've never met.
But the possibilities created by global DNA databases are now far more astounding than anything Long Lost Family has shown us so far.
Writer Barbara Demick spent years in China reporting on its cruel 'one-child-per-family' policy, which lasted from 1980 to 2015. Parents who dared have a second baby were punished with fines equivalent to several years' income. Officials from the Family Planning department smashed up their homes and confiscated their possessions — often stealing their children, too.
Many thousands of Chinese children were adopted by Europeans, Americans and Australians. At that time, it was unimaginable any of them would ever be able to discover their own roots.
'An adoptee finding her birth family seemed no more likely than locating a particular grain of sand,' wrote Demick, whose book Daughters Of The Bamboo Grove was reviewed in the Mail on Sunday last weekend.
African dish of the night:
Visiting a pizzeria run by an Egyptian father and son, on Tucci In Italy (National Geographic and Disney+), actor Stanley was startled to learn the first pizzas were baked for the Pharaohs.
Surely, if that were true, they'd be pyramid-shaped instead of round.
Demick interviewed one man, Zhou Changqi from Hunan province, who was desperate for news of the daughter taken from him and his wife in 2001.
He'd sacrificed everything in his search, and was now living penniless in a corrugated iron shack. 'I miss my daughter all the time,' he begged. 'I know if she's gone to America, I can't get her back. I'm not trying. I would like to get a picture of her.'
Incredibly, in 2022, a DNA ancestry service brought them together. Zhou's daughter, who grew up in middle-class Indiana, took a test for health reasons, checking for genes that indicated a higher risk of cancer. Instead, she found her birth parents.
Both stories in the first of the new series of Long Lost Family seemed unremarkable by comparison. A woman named Lisa who was left in another baby's pram in the late 1960s discovered she had three full siblings — all of whom were brought up at home by their parents, both now dead.
Fortunately, Lisa enjoyed a happy childhood with her adoptive mum and dad. She must have wondered, though, whether she was any better off for knowing she was the only one of the four to be abandoned.
And a man from Neath, 59-year-old Simon, learned that his birth mother was still alive — but that she didn't want to meet him. That, too, was an unrewarding outcome, though he was warmly welcomed by his extended family of cousins.
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