An agonising search for family

DRAMAS about an adopted son trying to find his birth mother are nothing new. This one, by Peter Bowker, begins much as you'd expect - a man knocks on the door of a strange house and announces to the woman who opens it, "I'm your son". She denies it. He persists, pushing an invitation to the christening of his own daughter through the letterbox in the hope she'll turn up at the family gathering.

The problem for Joe Broughton is that she's telling the truth. This woman, a nurse named Barbara, isn't his parent. Her name is the one on his birth certificate in the space next to the word mother, but that was part of a cover-up 30-odd years ago to conceal the identity of his real parents.

Eventually he learns the truth, that his parents were patients in a mentally handicapped hospital, and that his mother was seven months pregnant before anyone knew about it. The baby was removed by caesarean. His mother Janet and father Harry never knew anything about their son.

This first jointly-funded collaboration between BBC Drama and the BBC's Disability Programme Unit explores the impact of the discovery on Joe and his family, bravely mixing professional actors with two non-professional actors with learning disabilities (Peter Kirby and Dorothy Cockin) as the newly-found parents.

At first, Joe, who has a wife and baby of his own, finds the knowing is worse than the not knowing about his real parents. He's always had a picture of his mother in his mind, he says, and Janet isn't it. Finding his parents arouses feelings of confusion, anger, fear and revulsion in all those in Joe's life.

Bowker is careful to feature a spectrum of reaction to the news, from the mother-in-law who treats Joe's parents like lepers, to his mates inquiring whether his parents are "a bit daft or fully-fledged nutters". His wife (Emma Cunniffe) does her best to understand what he's going through, although can't help herself calling the health visitor to check that their baby is "normal".

Flesh And Blood, part of BBC2's What's Your Problem season about disability, isn't always comfortable viewing. Some may be uneasy at the use of people with real disabilities, feeling they're being exploited. Others will applaud the decision to use such people rather than employing actors. What's not in any doubt is the power of Christopher Eccleston's performance as Joe. Few do tortured souls better than him and here the blend of agony and ecstasy at finding his parents is movingly done.