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DNA Family Secrets had me blubbing like a baby
The second series of BBC Two’s DNA Family Secrets is an emotive and insightful watch about love, loss and discovery

Only a cynical old stick could fail to be moved by DNA Family Secrets (BBC Two). And as a paid up cynical old stick, I have to say I was looking forward to not being moved. Here was, at least on the face of it, a classic example of nakedly manipulative television, precision-tooled to not so much tug on your heart-strings as tie lead weights to them and chuck them off a harbour wall

Reader, I blubbed like a baby. Every one of the show’s three searches for parentage and identity knocked me for six. But, in my role as critic as opposed to human being, let’s get the show’s obvious faults out the way. Firstly, using DNA to examine – we might as well say it – “who you think you are” is in no way watertight. DNA Family Secrets admitted as much, saying that a DNA test is only as useful as the database it’s tested against. The database, meaning people who have themselves been tested, currently comprises 30 million people worldwide, or half a percent of the world’s population. (Fun fact: DNA testing is illegal in France, apparently).

So you’re still looking for needles in haystacks. That all three of this episode’s subjects – Richard (52), on a life-long mission to discover the identity of his father; Janet (62), on the search for a half sister she thinks she once heard her late father talking about at a dinner party when she was nine; Glen (47), desperate to learn about his ancestry as a black man who’s never felt he is among “his people” living in leafy Oxfordshire – found answers on the database is something close to a miracle. A made-for-TV miracle.

Then there are the thorny ethical issues underlying a programme that, in digging into people’s parentage, can at times veer close to Jeremy Kyle territory. The delightful Richard, for example, discovered that his long-lost dad was alive and well. But the weepy rapprochement that TV demands never took place. What happened there? Some family secrets, one suspects, are secret for a reason.

Still, these are all valid points that should be understood to have come from a man who spent an hour grinning from ear to ear when he wasn’t fetching fresh hankies. DNA Family Secrets, like its clear relative Long Lost Family on ITV, is wonderfully moving television. Presenter Stacey Dooley is perfect as the shoulder to cry on, the selection of subjects is spot on, and the money shots – when a long-lost this or that first meets their new family member – always deliver, at least when they happen. It might be contrived but you’d have to be a cynical old stick not to enjoy it.