Born to Be Different review – stoicism in the face of disability, and being a teenager

It is 13 years since the first series of this challenging documentary, and hitting adolescence doesn’t make living with a disability any easier.  Plus: the puffins are thriving in The Last Seabird Summer

New challenges … the teenage stars of Channel 4’s Born to be Different. 
Photograph: Mark Johnson

It is now 13 years since the first series of Born to Be Different (Channel 4), which followed the lives of a group of babies born with a range of disabilities, was broadcast.  In two new episodes, five of those same children – all now approaching 16 – and their families met up for a reunion. 

Adolescence does not, as you might imagine, make living with disability any easier.  Self-consciousness about difference reaches new heights.  Children with severe learning difficulties face the prospect of physical maturity.  The parents of children with life-limiting medical problems find themselves facing up to those very limits.  Alone with all these new challenges, we are reminded through old footage of what it took to come this far. 

William has tuberous sclerosis, a rare genetic condition that causes tumours to grow throughout the body.  He has endured two major brain operations and now requires expensive medication to keep life-threatening kidney tumours at bay, which the NHS may or may not fund (it does in the end, after first deciding not to). 

Shelbie has a chromosomal disorder that means she needs constant care.  Her mother, Vicki, has raised six other children alongside her. 

Zoe was born with arthrogryposis, a condition that affects the flexibility of her limbs.  Over the course of nine series – which is to say, her life – she has had three major operations to enable her to walk, and further surgery on her hands and arms.  All of which she bore with a stoicism beyond her years.  Her mother Anne Marie calls her “my double hard little bastard”.  Now in her last year of secondary school, Zoe wants to be a prefect, although her teacher is pushing her to run for head girl.  She reluctantly accepts the challenge – not for a lack of ambition. “ I’m just scared about the speech, really,” she says. 

It is the parents who make the deepest impression in this reunion, still coping with all the attendant challenges – and some new ones – with bottomless patience, inexhaustible determination and an unfailing sense of humour.  You probably don’t have to be a parent to have found this an exceptionally uplifting – and unbelievably draining – hour of television, but I am, and I did. 

Adam Nicolson with gannets in The Last Seabird Summer.  Photograph: James Nutt/BBC/Keo Films

The seabirds who make their home on a little clutch of Scottish islands called the Shiants are thriving, and thereby bucking a wider trend.  The Scottish coast has seen a 40% decrease in seabirds in recent years, and in some areas the decline is much steeper – one Orkney headland has lost 90% of its kittiwake population.  In The Last Seabird Summer? ( BBC4), the writer Adam Nicolson explored the sometimes difficult history of the relationship between the birds and humans. 

Nicolson is uniquely positioned to, as he says, “immerse myself in the lives of the birds”, not least because he used to own the Shiants.  They were purchased for a nominal sum by his father, Nigel, in the 1930s.  It’s no resort, though.  There is just one habitable dwelling, which might not meet your definition of the word habitable: no electricity, toilet or running water. 

These days the population hovers around zero, apart from a few grazing sheep and some rats that deserted a sinking ship (literally) in the 1740s.  That, plus 250,000 seabirds – puffins, razorbills, guillemots, shags – nesting in the forbidding cliff faces in summer.  It is the kind of place you can imagine Donald Trump describing as an eyesore. 

It is clearly a magical, if daunting, environment – “Beautiful,” as Nicolson said, “in a hard and unforgiving way.”  But he is not sentimental about the birds, or at least he is trying hard not to be.  Long after humans gave up on the Shiants as a place to live, the birds formed a major part of the local diet.  The programme featured interviews with elderly men from Lewis – just four miles away – who remember hunting puffins on the islands. 

In what must be considered a mission well beyond the call of duty, Nicolson travelled to Iceland – where they’re still keen on puffin – in order to eat one himself.  This was obviously a bit of a trial for him, although he was pretty impressed with the way his guide to puffin-hunting, Sigi, was able to fish them out of the air with a net.  But it takes a sackload of dead puffins to make a meal, and I’m pretty sure that when Nicolson reluctantly bit into one and compared the taste to duck, he was lying. 

This was a thoughtfully executed, admirably intentioned piece of work.  If you like seabirds, there is a part two coming, which should be less arduous – I think Nicolson may well have eaten his last puffin.