Long Lost Family

STV, 9pm, last night

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IN nine series of the programme that brings together fathers and daughters, mothers and sons, sisters and brothers, the makers of Long Lost Family had never had a case like it. How do you handle a reunion when one party is famous?

There have been similar meetings on the show’s nearest BBC relation, Who Do You Think You Are?, but these usually involve a branch of a family tree that went its own way generations ago.

Scottish singer-songwriter KT Tunstall’s search was of the up close, personal and relatively recent kind. She had found her birth mother two decades ago but had never been able to trace her father. Her mother, who lost touch with him after the birth, did not even have a photo.

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Enter the Long Lost Family team. “Using trained intermediaries, DNA experts and investigators all over the world, we find people that nobody else can trace,” said host and fellow Scot Nicky Campbell. It would have sounded like the intro to some corny, A Team-style drama, but as anyone who has seen the show can confirm, Long Lost Family is no laughing matter. Crying, certainly, but laughs, not so much. All human life is here, some of it desperately sad.

Kate Victoria Tunstall was born on June 23, 1975, in Edinburgh. “A little quarter Cantonese, half Irish, quarter Scottish baby with lots of black hair,” as she described herself. Adopted at 18 days by a physicist and a teacher, she had a happy upbringing in St Andrews.

Tunstall knew from experience that reunions could be complicated. The first few years of getting to know her birth mother, Carol Anne, were “tricky” because Tunstall was just becoming well known. “The tabloid press were hounding her more than they were hounding me,” she said.

Carol Anne eventually moved from Edinburgh to Spain, where Tunstall met her to find out what she could about her father. He had been keen to try to keep the family together, which Tunstall found both moving and frustrating. “He was obviously a loving guy and that counts for a lot.”

True to Nicky Campbell’s word, the team found out what had happened. Tunstall’s father had died in 2002. But after Tunstall was born he had gone on to marry and bring up two daughters, neither of whom knew anything about a previous child.

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The two women, Siobhan and Lesley-Anne, seemed understandably dazed by the whole Long Lost Family experience, and in particular finding out that their sister was someone whose songs they had sung at karaoke evenings. They had even seen her at T in the Park.

Campbell, himself adopted, was there to steer them, and Tunstall, through the emotional rapids, which he did in a gentle, unfussy fashion.

What happened next you can doubtless guess, and if not do catch up on the STV Player. Several questions were left unanswered. Did Tunstall’s father, for example, know or guess who his daughter was?

Long Lost Family has had some sad outcomes occasionally, and Tunstall’s was to some extent. She would never look her birth father in the face, never get “that hug” she had wanted so long.

What she did get was different, but no less special for that. When all three women met there was no “her and them”, no celebrity and otherwise, they were all equally amazed at the turn their lives had taken. No fiction writer would have come up with such an undramatic ending, but that only made it more believable. Truly, there is nowt so queer, or astonishing, as folk.