Long Lost Family: Born Without Trace; Mourinho; Million Dollar Nannies

“At Waterloo station four years after the Second World War, an unmarried mother left a bundle of cloth on a carriage seat and slipped off the train unseen — leaving behind nothing to identify herself. Minutes later, hearing a whimper, the porter discovered a tiny infant and called the police. Though doctors thought she must be about five weeks old, the baby girl weighed barely 5lb. The loving parents who adopted her called her Christine, unaware that her birth mother had given her a different name… a fact that was not uncovered for more than 75 years. Long Lost Family: Born Without Trace makes fascinating use of current technology to achieve the impossible, winding back time to discover information that seemed lost forever. With the series now in its seventh year, we’ve seen this done repeatedly, but it never loses its capacity to astound and move us.”
Christopher Stevens, Daily Mail

“Among his previous credits, the director of this mini-series Joe Pearlman can count the revelatory and hilarious 2018 film, Bros: After the Screaming Stops. That documentary worked brilliantly because its subjects seemed so sweetly but devastatingly lacking in discretion or self-awareness that everything they said landed like a line from a Christopher Guest parody. They couldn’t help themselves. In terms of a character study, storied football manager José Mourinho is a very different kettle of cold fish. Like the Goss twins, he takes himself very seriously indeed, but that’s pretty much where the similarities end. He’s something of a closed book. “You are pushing me to speak about myself,” he says, towards the end of the final part of this series. “And I don’t want to.” Which is fair enough but it does beg the question: why then, would you agree to be the subject of an in-depth three part documentary series?”
Phil Harrison, The Guardian

“This is a show that is genuinely hard to watch. I don’t mean that in a metaphorical sense. I mean it in the sense that it hurts your ears. Much time is dedicated to the nannies screeching insincerities at each other, and there is the occasional attempt to create emotional depth as they therapy-speak their way through explaining that their own parents were always very distant (resist the urge to think: “I don’t blame them”) and that this is why they’ve chosen to become nannies (healthy!). This show nearly made me a misogynist. Indeed, it very much would have done were it not for the fact that the two mannies are just as bad.”
Charlotte Ivers, Sunday Times