It is, we agree, although we are perhaps a little embarrassed by the truism, every parent’s nightmare: your child by your side one moment, gone the next. Kelly Macdonald, the co-star of Sunday’s BBC adaptation of Ian McEwan’s novel The Child in Time, knows how easily it might happen. She watched her own little boy following an older lad in a shop, holding his hand up in the expectation that he would take it, believing the available hand was his mother’s. “And then they sort of parted ways and he saw me — but he hadn’t any idea.”
Sadly, the disappearing child is becoming many viewers’ recurring nightmare too, seen far too frequently in drama: Broadchurch, The Missing, The Killing, The