“The Body Detectives” airing 9pm on Tuesday on Channel 4, skillfully merges two well-loved TV genres. One is a tearjerker-style like ‘Long Lost Families’ governed by Davina McCall, that showcases people finally meeting their previously unknown relatives. The second is a fond British backdrop displaying a quest for intriguing historical snippets, as popularised in shows such as Time Team, Royal Autopsy, and Digging for Britain.
When you integrate the two genres and incorporate a grave voiceover, you produce “The Body Detectives”. This show focuses on reopening unresolved mysteries involving deceased or vanished individuals whose bodies were never discovered.
The empathetic Davina in this show is played by ex-detective Dave Grimstead, affiliated with Locate International – an entity that rediscovers neglected mysteries and adds an identity and narrative to each unknown individual. In an engrossing first episode of three, he’s off to Norfolk’s eastern coast, where George Johnston, a 26-year-old, unexplainedly vanished while vacationing in 1984.
Johnston disappeared while attempting to rescue a distressed family, only to be swallowed by a powerful undertow. His daughter Lucy, merely two at the time, was left without a dad, creating an unthinkable family void. Lucy spent her youth in confusion with an unidentifiable self-identity due to a lack of knowledge of her father. She described it as being the hardest part of her childhood.
Lucy and her Uncle Barry (Johnston’s brother-in-law), who witnessed Johnston’s disappearance, meet Grimstead in Norfolk. Haunted by the event, Barry recounts the last visual of Johnston being overtaken by a wave before disappearing under the sea, reminiscing about the ocean’s unforgiving nature.
Alongside missing persons expert, Emma Tilley, Grimstead starts investigating and cross-references data of unidentified bodies from 1984. They stumble across a possible lead in France, where a man’s remains were discovered on Ambleteuse beach in Pas-de-Calais.
With great solemnity, the body is unceremoniously unearthed, revealing a man interred in his azure bathing suit adorned with three white lines. Grimstead stresses the gravity of disturbing a human’s eternal resting place, however, he believes that it is a necessary act if it could potentially lead to closure for Lucy and her kin, acknowledging the enormity of the situation.
However, the subsequent DNA analysis reveals that the man discovered on the desolate beaches of Ambleteuse is, in fact, not George Johnston. This daunting twist of fate emphasizes the intricate difficulties intrinsic to investigations of this nature and reiterates that the hunt must persist.
Regrettably, there is no joyous resolution at hand for Grimstead’s team, but the relentless work continues, unabated. Emma Tilley stressfully asserts that these are indeed cold cases for a reason, given their complicated and difficult nature. The priority lies in ensuring every feasible avenue has been exhaustively explored. Despite painstakingly checking every conceivable pathway, there is still no sign of George Johnston. Barry comments on this pointedly, indicating the harsh and unrelenting nature of the sea and the raw grief left in the wake of the sudden, unexplained disappearance of a dear one.