Reggie Yates: Searching for Grenfell’s Lost Lives, BBC Two review - a necessary portrait of the victims as individuals

There was tangible emotion in Reggie Yates: Searching for Grenfell’s Lost Lives (BBC Two) as the radio host and TV presenter set out to put a face on some of the victims of last year’s Grenfell Tower disaster in west London.

“Who were they – these women, these men, these children – before they became names and faces on a memorial wall?” asked Yates. Any doubts that it was a question that needed asking, or deserved answering, were dispelled by the end of the film. Largely by reminding viewers of the depersonalising effect such a large-scale disaster can have (the death toll was 71, with a further 223 made homeless).

No matter how awful the news footage, unless we lost a loved one ourselves or were otherwise directly affected, the numbers are so overwhelming that the impact at an individual level can often be lost.

Yatesbegan by picking out two of the people whose names were most often mentioned on the wall: 21-year-old British-Moroccan Yasin El-Wahabi, and 12-year-old Columbian Jessica Urbano Ramirez. He spoke to friends and locals, building up a picture of Yasin in particular, a much-liked community youth leader believed to have not been in the tower when the fire started, but killed when he went in to try to rescue his family, all five of whom perished on the 21st floor.

Yates was particularly adept at gently building a sense of the victims as individuals and how their varied life experiences had brought each of them to Grenfell Tower.

The case of Syrian refugee Omar Alhajali, who recounted the story of how he had escaped the fire, but lost his 25-year-old brother Mohammed with whom he had fled Syria three years ago to forge a new life in London, seemed doubly tragic. But, of course, in many ways that was the point of this film: every one of the lives lost or ruined by Grenfell is a tragedy in its own right.