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The co-directors not only chronicle a landmark scoop, but also highlight the importance of investigative journalism.

– RADIO TIMES

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Before the internet. Before social media. Before breaking news. The victims of Thalidomide had to rely on something even more extraordinary to fight their corner: investigative journalism. 

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Throughout the late 1950s and early 1960s tens of thousands of expectant mothers took thalidomide, a defective morning sickness remedy, one of the last remnants of the Nazi science experiments of the 1940s. Little did they know that thalidomide was attacking their unborn child’s nervous system. Many of the victims were stillborn and the survivors were born with severe physical or mental disabilities, or both. Then editor of the Northern Echo, Harry Evans was one of the first journalists to seriously ask how a drug this destructive ended up on the market, and why, given the obvious devastation it had caused, no compensation was forthcoming from those responsible.