One of the founding principles of the Cutting Edge documentary strand is that it looks at what is really happening, behind the scenes, of stories in the news. Faith and Hope’s short lives, and the medical team’s efforts to extend them, were an ever-present topic of discussion in Britain in the weeks before Christmas.

It was extraordinarily brave of their parents to allow themselves to be filmed.

The film was a faithful picture of how Laura and Aled coped with the trauma of their daughters’ condition.

I felt that they explained very clearly their decision not to have an abortion, and why they took it.

I felt, as did many of the other viewers who have told me how much they valued the film, that Laura and Aled displayed extraordinary grace under extreme pressure. Other people, confronted with the situation they found themselves in, may well have coped differently, and shown their feelings in different ways. No two people are alike, and it is important to remember this when describing another person’s reaction to a challenging situation as “normal”, or not.

The differences between us, and the human experiences that unite us, are at the heart of Channel 4’s documentary output, and I am proud to have commissioned and broadcast the story of Faith and Hope, and of their parents.

Since we already knew the outcome of the sad story of Hope and Faith, what was it that this programme hoped to add? That people in extremis are misguidedly willing to offer thenselves up to be sacrificed on the altar of TV because they think their story might ‘inspire’ others? Because watching two tiny human beings, clearly doomed from conception, undergo ground-breaking but ultimarely useless surgery is intrinsically educational for the general populace (rather than an audience limited to experts in the field)? What did we learn about the thought processes that lead to the young couple’s decision to continue the pregnancy against medical advice? Nothing more than in media interviews at the time. What did we learn about their emotional journey as they faced the undoubted agony of losing one, then the other baby following harrowing, continuous and massive medical intervention? Almost nothing. Throughout the programme they seem to be have been emotionally anaesthetised, their comments reduced to badly scripted, anodyne soundbites utterly incongruent with the gravity of the situation.

One of the greatest ironies was the hospital PR officer reminding the obviously distressed surgeon (who was about to give a press conference following the first death) ‘not forget to say he was sorry’ because although he knew he was sad it was easy to forget to say so in the heat of the moment and it wouldn’t play well to the press. Didn’t the programme-makers think to give the same warning to the parents about how THEY might come across to the audience?

More to the point, didn’t it occur to anyone who watched this programme before transmission that it would be better NOT to show it all? It clearly was not the hoped for story of triumph over adversity, hope over expectation, ground-breaking surgery resulting in life rather than death. It did not inspire. It traced a succession of hearbreaking events which surely anyone with a shred of humanity and the benefit of hindsight would have preferred to avoid at all costs.

Instead I was left with an unwanted, maybe unwarranted, but nevertheless unshakeable impression that the young couple had been so consumed by the process of making a TV programme that they came to believe they were taking part in a drama, something like Casualty, which would reliably follow a well-rehearsed fomula: a period of anguish, suspense, sorrow, but would inevitably have some kind of happy ending. Even the prayer offered up the grandfather seemed uncomfortably ’staged’. They appeared to have become detached from the tragedy that was unfolding before our eyes. They seemed blind to the daily deterioration of the babies, the increasing hopelessness of their condition, the obvious despair of the medical team as they ran out of options.

I hope this was not so. I hope the truth is that they were incredibly brave, and that they preferred to express their emotions privately off camera in order to retain their dignity.I would have liked the narrator to have reassured me that this was the case because a very different story was being told by the camera. My feeling is that this programme was highly exploitative of two young people who were emotionally vulnerable and probably naive, irrespective of whether they gave their full consent. It did not inspire, enlighten or inform, challenged nothing and was ultimately intrusive and voyeuristic. Sometimes people need protecting from themselves. That 15 minutes of fame so many aspire to in this age of celebrity can backfire pretty spectacularly. These were not ‘Britain’s’ conjoined twins. They deserved the dignity, as we all do, of a private life and a private death. As a so-called ‘public service broadcaster’ Channel 4 should have known better.