When a Mother’s Love Is Not Enough

BBC One

The posh jeweller Rosa Monckton is married to Dominic Lawson, son of Nigel, brother of Nigella. The Lawsons are an odd family — rich, clever, cold-seeming, prone to tragedy — but they tend to be frank about their misfortunes. Even so, I was not prepared for the candour and courage that Rosa Monckton delivered on When a Mother’s Love Is Not Enough, her heartfelt and important documentary about our collective neglect of parents of severely disabled children.

She told us how, when her daughter Domenica was born 14 years ago with Down’s syndrome, she would have jumped out of the window if one had been in reach. She felt not only “crushing despair” but “deep shame” about raising a disabled child. Oddly enough, her husband, having been brought up in a family that admired most of all cleverness, took the diagnosis more calmly. There was no point in making Domenica compete, he reasoned, so they would revert to just loving her. But Monckton could not always rationalise away her feelings. One night, after five nights in a row up with her, she shook her sick child, mercifully coming to her senses in time.

Monckton did not tell these tales with any nostalgia or to suggest that love will get you through. Her struggles were continuing. She was still trying to persuade her elder daughter that Domenica’s future was not her responsibility and arguing with Dominic over whether a time would come when she would live apart from them in a home. If she was making a point with her stories, it was that they hardly compared with the nightmares of other families. On “Rosa’s Journey”, as the programme’s subtitle patronisingly put it, she met some of them.

So she went to Braintree to meet Don and Mavourneen Moore, devoted parents whose son Cameron suffers from severe Asperger’s and, aged 17, had turned from an eccentric child into a very disturbed, very angry and sometimes violent young man. Mavourneen admitted that she had considered throwing herself and her son in front of a train. Monckton met Julie Evett in Devon, a single mother who nursed her three-year-old, Rose, blind, epileptic and brain damaged. Evett had considered killing not only herself and Rose but her two other children because she could not bear to leave them behind. Monckton judged her “very close to cracking up”. In Dorset, she met Asher Nardone whose son Callum is 12 going on 2 (unable to walk, dress or feed himself) and whose local social services wanted her to measure his “inflow and outflow” before upping his daily nappy allowance.

Finally she met a father called David Cameron whose disabled son Ivan had recently died. Monckton pointed out that parents were fighting on two fronts: to cope with their children’s needs and through the red tape that lay between them and help. What would he do as prime minister? He talked of a universal passport scheme whereby a single disability assessment would open every door. “That’s two things,” he said. Actually it was one, but let us judge him on whether he implements it. Monckton summed it up: what these families need is “help, compassion, common sense”. It says something about our politics that you cannot imagine any party — not even two led by two fathers of disabled children — making a slogan of them.

Horizon: Why Do We Talk?

BBC Two

A carer was briefly spotted on Horizon’s investigation into the origins of human speech (that’s a tautology, no other animal speaks). She was the wife of a stroke victim whose brain damage had rendered him incapable of talking normally. He was of much interest to scientists, that indefatigably curious breed whom, as we saw, had no compunction about attaching electrodes to a one-day-old’s cranium or filming one of their offspring continuously to see how his “gaga” transmuted into the word “water”. There was one experiment that remained forbidden however, the one where you separate a newborn from its parents for two years and see if it ends up speaking anyway. Among other things, a trial with colonies bred from an orphaned zebra finch suggested they would. The conclusion of this intriguing investigation was that Noam Chomsky was right — not necessarily about American fascism, you understand, but about speech being innate in human beings.

Collision

ITV1

“Jane Tarrant shares an intangible moment of connection with Richard Reeves,” Radio Times promised us, making part two of Collision sound like E. M. Forster. Jane, played by the excellent Lucy Griffiths, is a waitress at a café on the A12. Richard, the equally compelling Paul McGann, is a very rich man whose car crashed on it. When she wrenched his dislocated arm back into place, it was as if she was performing corrective surgery on his life. The secret of Collision, and why it differs from most TV drama, is that although the cast is large, every character has a back story. The only problem is that you want more of it. It’s not Howards’ End, but five hours of Collision may not be enough.

andrew.billen@thetimes.co.uk

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