Thursday's best TV: Shocking quest of two women who were sold when they were babies

Searching for Mum: Sri Lanka - BBC Two, 9pm
Daughter’s quest: Ria Sloan in Sri Lanka with the one baby photograph she has as she tries to track down her biological mother
BBC/Raw TV/William Lorimer
Katie Law @jkatielaw16 August 2018

Ria Sloan, 27, runs her own gardening business near Inverness. She grew up happily enough knowing she had been adopted at three weeks old but, being “the only brown kid” in this area of rural Scotland, she also “stuck out like a sore thumb”.

It was only recently that she felt compelled to try to track down her biological mother because of a line in her adoption papers stating that the family wished to have no future contact. Could this really have been so? “It feels vital for me to get as much information as I can, so I have to go back and search,” says Ria.

She and her girlfriend Cat take the one baby photograph she has, the baby outfit she was wearing and her adoption papers back to Sri Lanka, where they hire an experienced investigator who warns them that the details on her papers could well be false, as many have turned out to be.

By contrast, Rebecca, now almost 40 and living in Surrey with her husband Anton and their four children, grew up not knowing she was adopted until she was eight, when she accidentally discovered her adoption papers hidden in a linen cupboard.

Pictured: Cat Noble and Ria Sloan
BBC/Raw TV/William Lorimer

In spite of the “lavish parties, nice holidays, the best clothes and education”, this single catastrophic omission by her adoptive parents has scarred her indelibly. “I blamed my mother,” she says, and rarely sees her now. She claims that her unhappy childhood, “revolved around school, homework and grades”, while her adoptive mother, also briefly interviewed, says “we worked very hard to give her everything”.

Like Ria, Rebecca returns to Sri Lanka. It’s her third trip in 15 years, a last chance to find her birth mother — the previous trips having proved fruitless — made more urgent by Anton being diagnosed with motor neurone disease. “I’ve returned to search for my mother, my roots and, essentially, for myself,” she tells a press conference in Colombo. Over two weeks she and Anton visit government ministries, shanty towns and hospitals, and even hand out leaflets to random strangers.

As much as this two-part documentary (part two focuses on adoptions in India Thursday) is a moving story about the feelings of rootlessness and abandonment commonly experienced by adopted children, it is also a devastating indictment of the corruption in Sri Lanka that allowed an illegal baby trade to take place in the Eighties, with lawyers, medical professionals and adoption agencies all complicit.

Pictured: Rebecca Pararajasingam
BBC/Raw TV/William Lorimer

Last year the Dutch current affairs programme Zembla blew the lid off the wider story, claiming that the records of many of the 11,000 Sri Lankan children adopted in European countries, including the Netherlands and the UK, had been falsified. That programme also showed how the scandal of “baby farms” — where women were deliberately impregnated in order to sell babies abroad — was the reason that the Sri Lankan government suspended all inter-country adoptions in 1987.

But the most shocking part of Ria and Rebecca’s stories concerns the circumstances that forced their mothers (neither of whom were involved with baby farms) and women like them to give up their babies in the first place. Poverty, ignorance, social stigma, coercion and partners refusing to accept responsibility all played their part. As Ria puts it: “It’s quite shocking to think of the difference of my life and what I’ve created in Scotland, and what could have been…”

London Live

Mud Men - London Live, 8pm

Johnny Vaughan is going to prison. He’ll also be leaving prison, because he’s not locked up for too long in London’s oldest dungeon before he and Steve Brooker start scavenging for evidence of London’s penal past.

What would be easier would be having a gander at Wandsworth or Brixton, yet the pair insist on digging for shreds of long-vanished Millbank Prison, demolished at the end of the 19th century. It was a foreboding structure, so large that even guards became lost inside.

London Go - Tomorrow, London Live, 7pm

The contacts book of Jean-David Malat reads like a summary of pop culture royalty and actual royalty — the art dealer’s contacts including Madonna, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Kate Moss and members of the royal family.

Malat studied at Sotheby’s and earlier this summer opened his first gallery in London, the JD Gallery in Mayfair. He’ll speak to host Luke Blackall in the studio about his ambition for the space and how he spots the exciting new talents who become international names. There might even be time to find out what clients such as Bono or Gordon Ramsay have hanging in their conservatories…

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