Wanted: New Mum And Dad (C4)

Horizon: The Ghost In Your Genes (BBC2)

FOR a child to be taken from their parents, for whatever reason, is traumatic enough. Then to be classified as "unadoptable" can only make matters worse.

Other facts were hindering seven-year-old Sean finding a new home. He wasn't a baby, which adopters prefer. They also like girls rather than boys. He had red hair and wore glasses, also seen as disadvantages by some would-be mums and dads.

"Everything is against him," said a social worker of the lively lad who'd been taken into care three years previously because of his unruly behaviour.

Now he was a reformed character and eventually his video was submitted for one of Northamptonshire Social Services' Parents For Children Nights, in which videos of "hard to place" children are screened. Prospective adopters can register their interest afterwards. It may seem a bit like a lottery or even advertising children for sale on the Internet, but it seems to work.

Wanted: New Mum And Dad couldn't help but tug at the heartstrings as it followed efforts to find new parents for three youngsters through this method. We viewed the search through their eyes, offering a unique perspective on the difficult process of adoption.

Rhiannon, pictured above, found it "quite sad" she couldn't live with her first mum and dad, while Sean confessed that he "didn't know where I was going to stay when I left my mum".

For social workers, it was a case of matching up children and would-be parents. By chance, the couple interested in taking in Daniel had a silver car, one of the nine-year-old's passions.

He ended up with two dads, being adopted by a gay couple. He seemed to accept the situation rather more easily than others around him may, I suspect.

Sean and Rhiannon found permanent new homes too, after being carefully prepared for the move by social workers and therapists. For once, this was a documentary about children and family upheaval that left all the participants happy and cared for, and I wouldn't mind betting that a good many viewing were sobbing along with the foster mums as they sent the children off to live with their new mums and dads.

Horizon considered the controversial and alarming view that how your grandparents lived could affect how you die, namely that genes have the ability to carry illnesses that could affect the well-being of future generations.

"Not so much you are what you eat but what your mother ate or your grandmother ate," as someone put it.

This theory is considered scientific heresy by some scientists. There's no doubting the importance of this discovery if proven to be correct. I have to say that much of the programme blinded me with science with talk of epigenetics, the human genome project and chromosomes.

The idea, for instance, that famine could affect people 100 years later even if they never suffer famine themselves is a fascinating one. If true, the health of our generation could affect the health of our children and their children. Just think about it.