Why 10-year-old Max knocks grown-ups into a cocked hat! CHRISTOPHER STEVENS reviews last night’s TV
The A Word
Life and Birth
Rating: 
The best actor on the box right now isn’t Sandra Oh in Killing Eve or Lennie James in Save Me Too, remarkable as they both are.
It isn’t even Colin Firth, whose iconic turn as Mr Darcy can be enjoyed again as Pride And Prejudice is rerun on BBC4 from tomorrow.
No, the real star of the week is Max Vento, the ten-year-old at the centre of The A Word (BBC1).
‘A’ stands for autism and Max has played Joe, the autistic son of stressed-out parents Alison and Paul (Morven Christie and Lee Ingleby) since the show started in 2016 — delivering a performance that manages to be both convincingly accurate and profoundly moving.
The performance of Max Vento (right) in the BBC’s ‘The A Word’ as an autistic child is spot on
To convey autism on screen without over-reaching into parody is almost impossible. Dustin Hoffman produced a ghastly caricature in the 1988 movie Rain Man. He won an Oscar, with a portrayal as inauthentic as Orson Welles or Larry Olivier playing Othello in black facepaint.
But Max gets it right because he never shows off. Unlike most of the other characters in Peter Bowker’s absorbing family drama, he isn’t seeking attention.
All his emotion is directed inwards, as it so often is with autistic children.When Joe speaks, which is rare, he isn’t trying to communicate with the adults. He’s talking to himself, saying the things he needs to hear: ‘Joe’s all right . . . This is Joe’s new house . . .’
His father seizes on these scraps, desperate to have a conversation with his son. But he is missing their real value: Joe’s occasional words are glimpses of his hidden feelings.
My own younger son is profoundly autistic, and when I watch The A Word I’m constantly looking for moments of my own life mirrored.
There’s much more to the drama: Joe’s big sister, his uncle and grandfather all have their own stories. But it is Max’s performance that transforms this from the ordinary.
The detail that especially impressed me was the deliberate way Joe removed his headphones after leaving his old house. As soon as he did it, I knew what was coming, because I have seen my own son act with such quiet decision many times.
Those headphones have been practically welded to Joe’s head for four years. Five minutes after taking them off, he chucked them in a lake. To an autistic person, so prone to obsessive behaviour, inanimate objects can exert a kind of tyranny.
Sometimes the only way to be rid of it is to destroy the thing . . . however much loved or expensive it was.
Psychologists blandly label this ‘challenging behaviour’, as if it’s merely a trial of parental skill, a challenge . . . like going a goal behind in a football match.
It isn’t. It’s a brutal test of health, marriage and mental endurance. My boy is 23 now, with marvellous full-time carers — but my heart goes out to anyone struggling to look after a child like Joe in lockdown.
The hospital documentary ‘Life and Birth’ on BBC One conveys the story of yoga teacher Roo (above) and the wait for her first baby with junior doctor husband Rich
Parenthood is tough from the start, a fact made cruelly clear to yoga teacher Roo and her partner Rich, a junior doctor, as they prepared for the arrival of their first baby, in the hospital documentary Life And Birth (BBC1).
Roo was using visualisation techniques, imagining a painless, tranquil birth in calm surroundings. Even when her contractions started, she insisted they felt lovely.
The illusion didn’t last. The birth was exhausting to watch, and ended with a forceps delivery and a surgical team on standby.
As both Life And Birth and The A Word prove, the awful truth is that parents can do everything right . . . and sometimes it still goes wrong.
EastEnders of the night: Novice farmers Kirsty and Simon in A Country Life For Half The Price (C5) named their piglets Kathy Squeal, Piggy Mitchell and Chop Cotton. What about Dirty Pen and Hamjie Watts? But keep them away from the Butchers.