When the law fails snatched children

Cutting Edge: Snatched (C4)

Rebels And Redcoats: The American Revolutionary War (BBC2)

Six years ago Alison Lalic's husband took their two children to his native Bosnia and since then, despite the abduction being ruled illegal in the international courts, has refused to return them.

No wonder it was a tearful Alison who embarked on a dangerous attempt to snatch them back, followed by Cutting Edge cameras.

She had help - from British muslim, housewife and mother Donya al-Nahi, whom Interpol regards as an international child kidnapper. The mothers of the 20 snatched children she's brought back to Britain from foreign countries regard her differently.

For Alison, this represented the last chance to be reunited with her daughters after the law had failed her. The mission was tricky enough, you'd have thought, without a camera crew following them around. But the secret filming gave the documentary a raw, immediate feel as the two women attempted to track down Alison's husband to his home village.

Even identifying her daughters was a problem as Alison hadn't seen them for six years. A wait for them to intercept them as they walked to school proved fruitless. So they confronted a brother, only to learn Alison's husband had gone to live in Iran with their daughters.

This came to light after the film crew, seeing the search had come up against a brick wall, decided to secretly record sound in the brother's house. The production team then found an address in Iran and obtained the first photographs of the girls that Alison had seen for five years.

The decision for Alison and Donya to go to Iran was a difficult one. That country's law gives the father rights over the mother. If caught, they faced prison.

Having ensured that her husband was away at work, Alison sat in the van outside his apartment fantasising about what she would do if Donya managed to get her daughters outside the apartment to play in the snow.

"I can't break down. I've got to be strong," said Alison, psyching herself to get through the heartbreaking ordeal.

She did make contact with her daughters, who'd been told by their father that she was dead, but it was only temporary. She realised she couldn't snatch them back. But the trip was not a failure. "For the first time I felt like a mother again," she said.

Conflict on foreign soil too as historian Richard Holmes began a four-part series about the American War of Independence in Rebels And Redcoats. As soon as he said "or so the myth goes", you knew he was determined to re-write history. His thesis was that it was actually a "bloody civil war" which divided families, with brother fighting brother, and promised liberty, but only for some.

He delivered the evidence driving around sites of famous battles, piecing together fragments of history that many of us recall - the Boston Tea Party, Paul Revere, Bunker Hill and so on - into a comprehensive account of the time. And there were no shortage of volunteers to put on costumes to re-enact scenes from the war. Next to Snatched, however, it all looked contrived