Channel 4's Love You to Death revisits the Lisa Hayden-Johnson case, with her children speaking on camera

Love You to Death, a three-part Channel 4 series beginning on Wednesday 19 August at 9pm, returns to the case of Lisa Hayden-Johnson, the Devon mother who for six and a half years presented her son Matthew to the public and to doctors as one of Britain's sickest children.

She claimed he had cerebral palsy, cystic fibrosis, diabetes and severe food allergies. He was placed in a wheelchair and fed through tubes. He underwent more than 325 medical encounters, including blood tests, intravenous treatments and nine general anaesthetics. None of the conditions were real. Hayden-Johnson was arrested in October 2007, convicted in 2009 of child cruelty and perverting the course of justice, and sentenced to just over three years.

At a glance

• Love You to Death is a three-part Channel 4 series, beginning Wednesday 19 August at 9pm
• Lisa Hayden-Johnson was arrested in October 2007 and convicted in 2009
• She was convicted of child cruelty and perverting the course of justice and sentenced to just over three years
• Her son Matthew underwent more than 325 medical encounters, including nine general anaesthetics
• Matthew, now 25, and his sister Laura, now 27, both appear
• Hayden-Johnson speaks on camera for the first time since leaving prison, without showing her face

What the series does differently

The obvious hook is that Hayden-Johnson speaks on camera for the first time since leaving prison, though she does so without showing her face. What she says is not contrition. "The only thing I was guilty of was putting my son first and fighting his battle, which is what I did," she says. "And I don't regret that."

The more substantial choice is structural. The series brings together doctors, police officers and family members, which turns it from a portrait of one person into an account of a system. That is a harder programme to make and a more useful one, because the interesting question about this case was never why she did it.

The question the case actually poses

Matthew's supposed illness was not a private deception. It ran through hospitals, charities, fundraising appeals and press coverage for six and a half years. He became a recognisable figure. Each of those institutions had, at some point, a reason to ask a question that was not asked, or was asked and then dropped.

Fabricated illness cases are genuinely difficult to detect: the reporting parent controls the history, symptoms are described rather than observed, and clinicians who challenge a mother's account risk being catastrophically wrong. But the difficulty is an explanation, not an excuse, and a documentary that includes the doctors is at least willing to sit inside it.

Matthew and Laura

Matthew is now 25 and works in finance. His sister Laura is 27. Both appear in the series, and the closing episode deals with the aftermath — the press branding of their mother, and the divisions inside the family that followed.

This is the part that makes the programme worth defending. Children in these cases are the subject of the story before they are old enough to have any say in how it is told, and the archive footage of Matthew in a wheelchair was broadcast long before he could consent to it. A series in which he sets out his own account is, at minimum, a correction of that imbalance.

The true crime problem

British broadcasters have produced a great deal of this material in recent years, and the format carries a standing risk: a real person's worst experience gets shaped into three acts, scored, and scheduled at nine o'clock.

The distinguishing feature here is that the people most harmed are participants rather than subjects. That does not neutralise the objection — the tabloid label "Britain's most evil mother" is a marketing asset for the programme, whatever its makers think of it — but it does change who is in control of the telling.

What happens next

The remaining episodes follow, with the concluding instalment dealing with the family in the years since the conviction. Channel 4 lists the series as three episodes, all available on its streaming service from the first transmission.

The wider context is that fabricated or induced illness remains a live safeguarding issue rather than a historical curiosity, and the medical and legal handling of it has changed since 2009. Whether the series engages with that, or stops at the personal story, is the fair test of what it is for.