Simon Jarrett

Robert Bogerud (Svein André Hofsø Myhne) is a private detective in Humphrey Bogart gumshoe mode. Dressed in a brown trench coat and fedora, he sits in his office, dark except for the feeble light of a table lamp, as a smoky jazz soundtrack plays quietly in the background. Detective Downs 2013, streaming on Netflix Norwegian, with English subtitles We are in classic Raymond Chandler 1940s detective film noir territory. Except we are nowhere of the sort.

So how fares The Assembly, the interview show where a group of learning disabled, autistic and neurodiverse people interview a celebrity, the only rule being that no subject is out of bounds? I reviewed it favourably in Community Living last summer, impressed by its freshness, the interviewers’ disarming of their prey with direct questions and the impressive mix of honesty, seriousness and humour.

Twenty-five years ago, Professor O Conor Ward, biographer of John Langdon Down, the man credited with the “discovery” of what is now known as Down syndrome, made an intriguing discovery himself. Beneath a desk in an office at Normansfield Hospital in London, one of Down’s former hospitals, was a box containing glass slides of 200 photographs, all taken in the 1860s. These were forgotten photos of patients at the Earlswood Idiot Asylum, as it was known, in Redhill, Surrey.