GREG DIXON finds a family's struggle to cope more than a little disturbing.
Allison and David Lawler are nervous. The 30-something American couple are soon to have their first children, but already they know their baby daughters will not be like most babies.
A scan has shown things that are "very wrong".
While there are two spines, the images appear to show they are extremely curved.
Worse yet, there is only one heart and it looks to be outside the bodies.
It soon dawns on the doctors: the Lawlers' twins will be Siamese twins.
They will be two girls, but will share only one heart, and this careful, thorough and rather upsetting, two-part documentary from Britain's Channel Four is their story.
This is not the first such programme - I can recall at least two documentaries in recent years charting the difficult lives of conjoined twins. But none has been quite like Joined.
The Lawlers gave writer, narrator and director Stephen White full access to their lives before and after the birth of their daughters - and you can't help wondering why the couple would do it.
Allison's understandable fear is all too easy to see in her wide, pleading eyes.
David, who looks not unlike Homer Simpson's Christian neighbour, Ned Flanders, attempts chipper but just comes off as shell-shocked. Their Christianity doesn't seem capable of defeating the great unknown, though perhaps talking to White's cameras offered a safety valve of confession.
"Well you think about 'Wow - what are we going to do?"' David says.
"Your mind races with all the requirements that it takes to raise children - let alone children that are, in some way or another, not perfect."
Just how the couple will cope is left to next week's second hour, when the twins are finally born. Tonight, White gives us a taste of the history and lives of Siamese twins who have survived. Hardly any of it gives hope to the Lawlers.
Conjoined twins are, of course, extremely rare, though not quite as rare as you might think.
They occur once in approximately every 200,000 live births, though three out of four are stillborn or die within the first 24 hours of birth.
The oldest living Siamese twins are Russian women Masha and Dasha.
Born in Moscow in 1950 and hidden and experimented on during the Soviet era, they are now frail, alcoholic and, they say, looking forward to death.
"We would have preferred not to have been born at all," Dasha tells White.
Until the 1950s, medical technology wasn't sophisticated enough to allow surgical separation. But since then around 300 sets of twins have been separated and in three-quarters of these cases at least one twin has survived.
Two 14-year-old Sudanese boys, who now live in England, are examples of how such procedures can succeed.
But as White discovers even they, though happy to have been separated, aren't altogether free of their past.
They have nightmares, they say, involving the two most famous conjoined brothers, Eng and Chang, born to Chinese parents in Siam. Eng and Chang, say the 14-year-olds, come into their dreams to rejoin them.
Whether the Lawler twins will live to have such fears remains to be seen. The early diagnosis in tonight's programme suggests the twins will not be candidates for separation surgery even if they do live. Hope is at a premium.
"We believe we may end up with two live twins," says Allison. "Healthy little blonde girls running around."
This programme is an altogether uncomfortable and disturbing watch.
* Joined - The World of Siamese Twins, TV One, 8.30 pm
GREG DIXON finds a family's struggle to cope more than a little disturbing.
Allison and David Lawler are nervous. The 30-something American couple are soon to have their first children, but already they know their baby daughters will not be like most babies.
A scan has shown things that are "very wrong".
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