“The Paralympic swimmer and Strictly contestant’s quest to track down her birth mother was unusually sincere, eye-opening and moving”
“Ellie Simmonds: Finding My Secret Family had its moments of ivory tinkling, but the Paralympic swimmer and Strictly contestant’s quest to track down her birth mother was unusually sincere, eye-opening and moving.”
Ben Dowell, The Times
“The exchange with Penny is one of the most moving moments in Ellie Simmonds: Finding My Secret Family, which, even allowing for the fact that it is a programme about a woman’s search for her biological mother, is packed full of them.”
Lucy Mangan, The Guardian
“If you didn’t know it from watching Simmonds during her Paralympic career or her time on Strictly Come Dancing, then you would absolutely know from this documentary that the gold-medal-winning swimmer is a lovely person. Throughout the film, she spoke of her birth mother with kindness and understanding, and never once expressed a moment’s self-pity.”
Anita Singh, The Telegraph
“Despite a series of emotional blows that had her frequently in tears, she refused to succumb to self-pity. She never blamed anyone, least of all the woman who gave birth to her and then, when dwarfism was diagnosed, could not bear to bring her up. But all the optimism in the world couldn’t guard against some of the shocks in her file. ‘Oh wow,’ she murmured, as she read through her birth mother’s interviews with social services. ‘She wanted me dead’ — either aborted or stillborn. To watch her absorb this news on her own was heartrending.”
Christopher Stevens, Daily Mail
The Effects of Lying, ITVX
“The Effects of Lying isn’t a great title, and the programme clearly wasn’t made with much money. More like a stage play, with one main location, it felt like a streaming experiment for the ITVX service. But its main problem was tonal. The many farcical elements consistently fought a rich and sombre thematic stew of identity, cultural expectations and adult incompetence. There simply wasn’t enough room.”
Ben Dowell, The Times
“It is an oddity, billed as ‘hilarious and heartwarming’ but in reality is absolutely neither of these things. Nor is it a ‘comedy-drama’ as advertised, because there are no jokes in it. Instead, it’s a rather sad story featuring marital unhappiness and, in one unexpectedly awful scene, a suicide.”
Anita Singh, The Telegraph
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