Long Lost Family is back for its 10th series

Television doesn’t get much more emotional than Long Lost Family.

After all, when you make a show about separation, unhappy childhoods, memories, loneliness, searching, and then – hopefully – reunion, you are guaranteed tears.

Presenter Davina McCall says: “I love a story that can make you emotionally connect, literally every single series.

“I’ve never watched an episode and thought, ‘Oh I can’t connect with this story in some way’.

“Sometimes it’s disappointment and sometimes it’s joy but it always touches someone in a certain way. It always gets you.”

The Bafta-winning reunion show is back for its 10th series tonight, as Davina and co-presenter Nicky Campbell reunite more family members with their missing loved ones.

The series starts with two heart breaking stories of separation: a mother and father who, having fought in vain to get their son back through the courts, have lived with a lifetime of loss; and a son’s search for his birth mother, who disappeared from his life when he was a baby.

Phyllis and Kevin Haran contacted Long Lost Family after more than 40 years searching for their first-born son. The couple fell in love as teenagers in Ireland in the 1970s and a couple of months into their relationship, Phyllis became pregnant. Aware of the scandal this would cause within their Catholic community, they hatched a plan to run away to England to bring up their baby.

But, in London, their landlady discovered they were keeping a baby in their flat and gave them less than 24 hours to get out. Homeless, jobless and desperate to put their baby’s interests first, they agreed through an agency to place their son in the care of a family, with the possibility of adoption if they couldn’t find their feet.

Phyllis says: “It was very difficult, having him and keeping him for five weeks and then having to give him up. I thought we’d get him back again.”

However, when they found jobs and a flat and returned to retrieve their son, the couple were told by a judge in court that he would be better off staying with the family who’d taken him in. Phyllis and Kevin never saw their son again. Still together, they approached the Long Lost Family team for help, hoping to put an end to their search, which has spanned more than four decades.

Most of the adoptions investigated on Long Lost Family are ones organised through official institutions. However, the second story in episode one features a son taken in by a family informally, leaving him with no official paperwork and no idea of his origins. Now 64 and a family man with children of his own, Michael O’Neil has a burning question that the family that brought him up have never been able to answer: what happened to his birth mother?

Michael says: “She just left me. She knew where I was, but she never came back for me. What happened?”

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