Christopher Stevens’s review about Miriam Margolyes’s shocking revelation

Miriam Margolyes is a multi-talented actor who is a master mimic, a mystical voiceover artist, a gifted reader, and a rowdy scene-stealer. She’s also a difficult person to like.

It’s not only that she’s obnoxious and vulgar. She sets out to shock, oblivious to the feelings of others, and then takes offence when they are upset.

Worse, she exposes the darkest aspects of herself and expects to be forgiven merely because she has made a complete confession.

On Miriam Margolyes: Up For Grabs (BBC1), famous Thespis appeared to regale us with accounts of Miriam’s scabrous behavior on production.

Both Charles Dance and Tony Robinson appeared confused, as if they realized the filthy stories were supposed to be humorous but couldn’t figure out what was going on.

Interviewer Alan Yentob questioned if there were any dark secrets she had left out of her memoirs at the end of an hour-long profile for the Imagine series.

Miriam was prepared to respond. She claimed she had beaten her mother Ruth after she had suffered a stroke that rendered her paralyzed.

Actress said in tears, ‘I am deeply ashamed of it,’

‘The thing that really gets to me is that my mother forgave me.’

Ruth died in 1974, more than half a century ago. But the admission was especially shocking because so much of the documentary focused on Miriam’s tight bond with her parents, whom she still refers to as ‘Mummy’ and ‘Daddy.’

She described how embarrassed they were when she told them she was a lesbian in the 1960s, and how they made her swear she wouldn’t sleep with other women (she broke her promise).

She also boasted of caring for her father Joseph at her London home during his last ten years while he struggled with dementia.

Her declaration that she had hit her crippled mother, stated without explanation or mitigation, made me doubt if I could believe the emotional truth of anything she had said at all.

Her emotions appeared to be cries of self-pity rather than regret. The pardon bothered her, as if it took away some moral high ground.

But we’ll never know because Alan never asked. He’s been giving these arty bios for years, but his interview approach hasn’t progressed beyond a set list of questions. He doesn’t elicit information; instead, he provides prompts.

When Miriam admitted to hitting her disabled mother, Alan was mortified and volunteered to cook chicken livers, a food Miriam remembered from her youth.

It was as if he believed that the greatest way to get over domestic abuse was to eat a good hot dinner and forget about it all.

Long Lost Family Special: Shipped To Australia was filled with childhood memories and horrific abuse (ITV).

Davina McCall and Nicky Campbell followed two families torn apart by the post-World War II Child Migrant Program, which plucked youngsters from care homes and sent them to the other side of the globe. They were abused as children in residential schools.

The reunions were low-key, which made this one-off episode weaker than the rest of the series.

Decades ago, two brothers had already discovered each other. And a man who had never met his parents or half-siblings was introduced to a niece for the first time — but the rest of his family had died.

As is customary, Davina and Nicky worked independently. Maybe the next episode of Long Lost will bring them together for the first time.

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