This was a very emotive film, as of course all media reports about missing children are and especially this high profile case, but the McCann’s have had to face so much, I wonder how they’re still standing; how they’re still functioning and able to live with what any parent will know must be the horrific thoughts about what could have happened to their daughter.

I can think of few things worse than having your child abducted, except perhaps not knowing what happened to her and if she’s dead or alive.

As we all know, on May 3rd 2007, their daughter Madeleine was abducted from their holiday apartment in the Portugese resort of Praia da Luz and she’s never been seen again. This Cutting Edge documentary examined the circumstances of her disappearance as well as catching up with how Kate and Gerry McCann have been coping with everything that’s happened to them since that fateful and devastating night…

They were of course suspects themselves for a while and vilified for leaving their children unattended in an apartment which is, as Gerry talked about in the film, something they have to live with on their consciences on a daily basis. The ‘what ifs’ must plague them night and day.

However, I was very surprised to hear Gerry say in the film that “No law agency is proactively doing anything” to find their daughter, which is why they’ve employed two former British police detectives – Dave Edgar and Arthur Cowley – to search for Madeleine using funds raised by their Find Madeleine appeal.

We were also told that the Portuguese police have now “shelved” their investigation into Madeleine’s disappearance and have released some 30,000 documents to Kate and Gerry McCann which detail their investigation. Kate, who now stays at home to look after their two other children, Sean and Amelie, goes over these documents relentlessly, hoping to spot something, some clue, that’s been overlooked. And quite apart from that, who can blame her for not wanting to take her eyes off her two other children whenever possible?

During last night’s film, we saw Gerry McCann returning for the first time since they originally left the resort to Apartment 5a of the Ocean Club complex, which is where the family were staying and where he last saw his daughter.

Also returning to Portugal to take part in a reconstruction of the events of that night were Jane Tanner and Matthew Oldfield, two friends from the group known as the ‘Tapas 7′, who were on holiday with the McCanns’ at the time.

The documentary reconstructed that critical night using eye witness testimony and where possible, the actual people involved such as Jane, who believes she actually saw Madeleine being carried away, but at the time, didn’t immediately assume she was witnessing an abduction; a fact that she finds hard to deal with now because she of course realises that her intervention at that moment could’ve meant that Madeleine was at this minute safe at home with her family. That must be a terrible burden for her to bear and it was heart rending to see her weep as she watched the actor playing Madeleine’s abductor carrying a child…

We heard how the two investigators, Dave and Arthur, are working on the theory that a man who was seen by several witnesses hanging around and staring at the McCann’s apartment is the man who took Madeleine, but of course, his purposes for doing so aren’t known. This is the latest artist’s impression of that man…

Dave and Arthur are optimistic regarding Madeleine’s fate in that her body has never been found, so one of their many working theories is that Madeleine was taken to subsequently be ‘adopted’…

I hope that’s the case; I really hope that one day, whenever that may be, that a girl comes along and says, “I think I’m Madeleine McCann”, but as far as I could see, the biggest flaw in this theory is that surely if a child were to be abducted for that reason, the ‘adopter’ would want a baby? And there were two babies in that room along with Madeleine but they were not taken.

Later in the film, I was horrified to see and hear that the locals and residents of Praia da Luz are so angry that this case has caused a reduction of holidaymakers to the area – and therefore affected their livelihoods – that they not only heckled Gerry McCann but had covered a billboard that showed Madeleine’s picture with paint. Have these people no compassion?? Gerry and Kate McCann were far more forgiving of this hostility than I would be, saying that they understood that the locals just “want it to go away”, but would the residents of Praia da Luz feel the same if it was one of their children who was missing?

It was and is repugnant that they’ve behaved in this way, and while I wouldn’t have boycotted the resort because Madeleine went missing there, I would now, simply because people who can be so callous and self-interested don’t deserve my or anyone else’s holiday custom in my opinion.

The entire programme was hard to watch; from seeing Kate and Gerry McCann with a certain something ‘missing’ from their eyes and faces – while trying to keep a façade of normality for their other children – to seeing how Gerry, Jane and Matthew Oldfield clearly reopened barely healed wounds by revisiting the area for the purposes of the reconstruction. It was clear that everyone involved that night – the so called Tapas 7 – feels a weight of responsibility which must feel like drowning in a sea of regret, sorrow and if-onlys.

It was also intensely moving too to see Kate and Gerry visiting the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children in the United States where they spent weeks helping the artists and computer technicians there build a picture of what Madeleine – at six – may look like now. These are the images that the center produced…

It was so sad to see Kate fighting back tears as she looked at a picture of a child she didn’t know, yet this child is very probably what her daughter looks like now. And it was distressing to think that it’s very possible that if Madeleine is alive, she may not have any idea of who she really is and may not even remember her ‘before’ family…

Kate said, “I only remember Madeleine when she was four. She remains four years old in my mind” but their fervent hope is that these new images will be seen by someone who recognises the child Madeleine will now be, and I so hope it works.

While in America, Kate and Gerry appeared on the Oprah Winfrey show to discuss the new age progression images and as always, their raw pain was clear to see and painful to watch… Here’s some of the footage from that interview.

Dave Edgar and Arthur Cowley remain convinced that the abductor is/was a local man and that someone in the resort knows who he is and what happened to Madeleine; they just need one person to come forward. As Dave explained in the film, “There’s someone local, lives locally, has the answer to this, and not much wider than 10 or 15 kilometres away from Praia de Luz.”

Arthur agrees and added, “The answer still lies in Praia de Luz, and it’s important that we focus on Praia de Luz and the surrounding area.”

Now the investigators hope that last night’s documentary and reconstruction may jog the memories of others who may know, or have seen, something significant. You can see the latest information about the case at www.findmadeleine.com

Overall, my personal feelings have been altered since this all first hit the headlines. My first thoughts were, how could intelligent, responsible people just leave their small children unattended in apartments like that? And I also believed that if the parents of Madeleine had been people from a ‘lower’ social class who’d done the same thing, there was a very real possibility that their remaining children would’ve been taken from them and placed in local authority care.

However, my feelings have changed over the last two years in that when I see the pain etched into the faces of the McCann’s, I can’t help but feel anything but sympathy and empathy for them. Yes of course it was horribly irresponsible to leave their children unattended, but not only have they paid the worst price imaginable for that decision, they will surely have punished themselves for that fact more than most of us can possibly imagine or make worse by continuing to berate them for that huge mistake.

The not knowing must be killing them but at the same time, keeping them going, because of course, Madeleine may be out there somewhere still, living under a different name in a new life and one day, she may come back to them.

The alternative is that she isn’t, and again, one day, her remains may be discovered and the McCann’s will at least then know, but I sincerely pray that it’s the former scenario that turns out to be the case.

This moving but important documentary did what it intended to do; it kept Madeleine in the public eye and therefore didn’t allow us to forget about her given that it’s been two years since she went missing. However, one of the many sad things about this case it is that there are thousands more just like it, but they don’t have the high profile that Madeleine does…

Not that I’m criticising Kate and Gerry for keeping up this momentum and constantly putting themselves in the frontline – that’s often more like a firing line – in order to keep the memory of their child fresh in people’s minds all over the world. They’re very brave to do so, given the backlash of hatred towards them whenever they raise their heads above the parapet – but thousands of children go missing every year and few of them remain ‘news’ for more than days, and some don’t even make it that far…

There are websites dedicated to finding missing children here in the UK though and you can see these at www.missingkids.co.uk and find more information here, www.npia.police.uk/missingpersons

Let’s hope that Madeleine is found soon and that an end can be put to the McCann’s suffering. Likewise, although it’s perhaps a naively optimistic hope, let’s hope that other missing children are found as a vicarious result of the raised awareness of this horribly traumatic issue that the McCann’s are ensuring stays very much in the public arena.