Television Review

"It seems like he's out there somewhere shouting 'I'm here. You're nearly there'," said Christine Needham at the beginning of Cutting Edge's film (C4) about her grandson Ben, a 21-month-old boy who disappeared from the Greek island of Kos in 1991. This vivid empathy with the child's sense of abandonment is, when you think about it, a peculiarly lacerating fantasy, one that refuses even the meagre consolation of realism. Wherever Ben is now, he is unlikely to have any memories of his former life and almost certainly would not speak English. But his grandfather, too, was ready to put words into his mouth: "Come on grandad," he imagined him shouting, "I'm here. What're you messing about at. I'm here. Come and get me." Nick Godwin's film looked at empty landscapes as you listened to these words, slow pans across vistas of loss.

"The Lost Boy" was less about the disappearance itself than about its deforming effect on the Needham family, in particular the grandparents, who were looking after Ben when he disappeared and who have since dedicated themselves to a penitential quest for his whereabouts. With the help of an anonymous benefactor, the reward for information leading to his discovery has been substantially increased, triggering a new rush of well-meaning and self-interested sightings, each of which has to be investigated by Eddie and Christine, who fund their search through car-boot sales. All they have to show for their efforts is a very large collection of snapshots of blond young boys. The Greek police long ago lost interest or, alternatively, simply came to terms with the increasing odds against any kind of happy ending. But for those closest to the story, its irresolution is, literally, maddening; Kerry Needham, Ben's mother, has suffered breakdowns since his disappearance and came to dread the obsessive recountings her parents were prey to - "No matter how many times you told it, the end was always the same."

Godwin's film was also an intriguing insight into what makes a story durable. Understandably perhaps, Christine Needham feels that the world has forgotten their distress. But the very existence of this documentary contradicted her sense of social amnesia and needed explanation. The mysterious disappearance of children is not unprecedented. So what was it that made this tale strike at the popular imagination so vividly? And what was it, six years on, that made Cutting Edge devote an hour of its time to a tale which had not materially changed? The answer dawned on as you looked at the pastoral scene from which Ben had been taken and as his solemn, large- eyed face faded in and out of the film. "You don't tend to think there are any bad people in a place that's nice and sunny like Kos island," said Christine, forgetting that Arcadia has always had its ghostly inhabitants.

Some famous lines of poetry came to mind - Milton's lines about that field where "Proserpin gathering flowers/ Herself a fairer flower by gloomy Dis/ Was gathered...", and everything that followed confirmed the mythic undertones - Ben's blondness and the notional darkness of his abductors (gypsy child-dealers providing the readiest suspects, and also amplifying the sense of a folk dread come true), the unending quest of the relatives, the journey from the world above to the subterranean realm (literally in the case of the Athens underground, a favoured area for child beggars; metaphorically in the case of remote villages and prisons). Nor would you need a classical education to feel these vibrations of the fabulous. Those poignant convictions of ungraspable presence that began the programme were strikingly like the scene in Poltergeist (a film moulded from mythic archetypes) in which a young girl cries for help from the television screen which has swallowed her up. Ben Needham's story may have an agonising novelty for his family, but in some respects, it is as old as the hills from which he disappeared.