Thalidomide: The Fifty Yr Battle, BBC Two, evaluation: "engrossing and moving"

Because the late Fifties and early Sixties, individuals who suffered extreme birth defects since their pregnant mothers took the Thalidomide drug for morning sickness have been followed by movie crews and newspaper journalists. The documentary Thalidomide: the Fifty Yr Battle (BBC Two) caught up with some of the 468 British survivors five decades on.

Some were only somewhat affected, other individuals were born with no arms and no legs. Archive footage showed a youthful boy inching painfully out of a toy auto with no limbs for support, and a teenager struggling to stability on his makeshift prosthetic legs, offering a fresh shock to their suffering. Nonetheless, the eloquence with which the Thalidomiders (as these affected now contact themselves) described their struggles was uplifting, and it was touching to see the clever adaptations – such as specially created cars – that have made their lives a tiny more comfy in excess of the years.

It was curious, then, that the insightful interviews did not dominate. Rather than exploring how their lives have altered above the decades, and their hopes for the long term, the Thalidomiders had been often sidelined in favour of journalists who retold the story of their battle for compensation.

Alternatively of documenting a “fifty year fight”, as the title insisted, the bulk of the movie replayed the decades-old wrangling between Distillers, who distributed the drug in Britain, and David Mason, 1 of the mothers and fathers. It did so engrossingly and movingly, but it left also little time to explore the lives of individuals impacted more than the final 25 many years.

In reality, the freshest element of the “fight” was only mentioned at the extremely finish. The survivors’ ongoing attempts to extract compensation from the German makers, Grunenthal (which has apologised but denies it could have identified about the drug’s side-results) could have made a riveting programme in itself but was alternatively neglected until finally the ultimate 3 minutes, as a postscript to a new edition of a historical past that could have been written decades ago. For a documentary that celebrated the position of campaigning journalism in holding Distillers to account, this was an odd determination.

TIMELINE: It has taken half a century for the victims to obtain an apology from Thalidomide’s inventors

This was an elegant summary of “one of the dirtiest pieces of litigation”, but it failed to recognise that the most remarkable “fights” are the triumphs and struggles of the Thalidomiders’ day-to-day lives, not the manoeuvrings of a courtroom.

Read: ‘IS THIS THE FORGOTTEN THALIDOMIDE?’

Thalidomide: The Fifty Yr Battle, BBC Two, evaluation: "engrossing and moving"