The 1Xtra presenter didn’t remember his father, and everything he had heard about him was bad. So why was he so driven to track him down?

Mim Shaikh is explaining why he went looking for his father. “My nan always said to me that when you turn 25, you become a real man,” the the BBC 1Xtra presenter says. “That’s when you know your own mind and can make proper choices.”

Now 27, Shaikh does seem to have changed in the past two years. He is still as warm and good-humoured as he was when we last met, but he seems more serious. It was the death of his grandmother in 2016, he tells me, that “changed everything” for him.

“I’ve always been curious about my dad,” he explains. “But never enough to go and find out, because I felt like it would be disloyal to my nan, who’d done so much for me.” After the breakup of her marriage, Shaikh’s mother was too unwell to look after him, so her widowed mother brought him up and took the decision to sever all contact with his father. “I was a single-parent kid, but my nan was my parent, not my mum,” is how he puts it.

The long-lost father has become something of a trope in TV and film: from characters such as Darth Vader to countless father-reveal plotlines on EastEnders. Often the absent dad is a lovable rogue; perhaps he was young and foolish back in the day and didn’t mean for things to turn out as they did. As an audience we are primed to root for an emotional reunion. But what happens when a fairytale ending comes with a darker twist?

It’s a question that hangs over Shaikh’s new hour-long BBC documentary, Finding Dad, in which he goes in search of the father he has not seen since he was a baby – whom he has never even seen a picture of. It’s a journey that sees him crossing continents, discovering new relatives, but also uncovering old wounds.

For years all Shaikh knew of his father was what he had been told by his mother’s family. That is that his mum met his dad when her family responded to an advert he had placed in a newspaper looking for a wife (both families had roots in Pakistan, and this was a not-uncommon occurrence in south Asian communities at the time). Shaikh’s parents met, married and settled in Dudley, near Birmingham.

Shaikh’s father quickly became abusive, he was told, allegedly hitting his mother and locking her in their home. Shaikh’s mother, who was 19 years younger than his dad, had significant learning difficulties and mental health issues. Under the strain of her difficult marriage, we are told in the documentary, she deteriorated further. When Shaikh’s grandmother discovered what was happening, she immediately set about removing her daughter – and the then-infant Shaikh. All contact with Shaikh’s father was stopped. By then, however, Shaikh’s mother was unable to care for the boy, so his grandmother looked after them both.

The three lived in south London, mainly in the Phipps Bridge housing estate in Mitcham. Money was tight, although the community rallied round, with neighbours and relatives helping to care for Shaikh and his mother. Shaikh struggled with feelings of anger and alienation, and what makes the documentary so engaging is his openness about how the situation affected him. This is also something he has addressed in his spoken-word work. In No Father’s Day, he recalls never having his mum or dad attend parents’ evening at school, only an aunt or uncle, and how it felt to have “classmates staring at your mum because she’s talking to herself”. Shaikh has described his relationship with his mother as closer to big brother and little sister: he has to look after her. Yet he says it has also encouraged him in his career, as he has risen from a baby-faced YouTube prankster serenading passersby to poet, presenter and actor – his most recent role being in the current BBC drama Informer.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Mim Shaikh photographed in London. Photograph: David Levene/The Guardian

“I think if you’re born into a single-parent family, there’s a drive to be a success. If I’m unsuccessful, there’s no one left to look after my mum. So I feel have to become successful in order to provide and live a good life.” Yet there is also a darker legacy, he admits. In a poem he reads aloud in the documentary, he wonders if children from abusive parents are “bad seeds” and “destined to do the same deed”. So why, if the stories he heard about his father were so negative, did he still want to track him down?

“I wanted the Disney ending so much,” he says. “I wanted him to put his arm around me and say, ‘Don’t worry, son, it’s all OK now. Don’t worry about all the birthdays that I missed – we’re together now.”

Shaikh begins his journey with the documents he does have – the first few photos he has ever seen of his father, and a birth certificate stating his dad’s name. He follows these to Birmingham, to a mosque he believes his father frequented, and is introduced to three community elders. This meeting, like many of the others in the documentary, is painful to watch: Shaikh’s eager questions are met with awkward silences and subtext-laden answers. The interviewees appear to be using euphemisms to avoid hurting him – his father was “impatient”, they say, and “badly behaved”. But, finally Shaikh has his breakthrough: one of the men lived with his father and can confirm not only that he is alive, but can supply his address – in Pakistan.

Which is where they eventually meet, after many calls in which Shaikh’s father puts the phone down on him. Persistence pays off, and as in all the best stories, father and son embrace and seem thrilled to find each other.

But while the reunion is emotional, there is no neatly tied-up happy ending. When Shaikh begins asking questions about his parents’ marriage, his father denies everything, both the abuse and the abandonment (arguing the family conspired against him), while Shaikh gets a further surprise in the shape of his father’s two young sons. Suddenly he has brothers. “I’ve grown up my whole life as an only child,” he says. “And I found out later that it wasn’t just those two. From other relationships of my dad, there’s an influx of siblings. It’s a big thing to adjust your mind to.” Shaikh is still figuring out how much his father and siblings will be in his life. “Water isn’t thicker than blood, but sometimes it can be,” he says.

Did he get the answers he craved? He wasn’t persuaded by his father’s version of events, he says, but still found some kind of resolution. And he was surprised by how much he felt at home in Pakistan. “My whole life I’ve been wrestling with identity issues,” he says. “Pakistan is in my blood – both my parents are from there. Before that I always thought I was more British than south Asian.”

‘I was reunited with my long-lost family on Oprah’ Read more

The experience also gave him a more profound understanding of his grandmother’s love. “There is no one that was stronger than her, mentally, in my family. Losing her was a big loss. But if she had never made those decisions, I wouldn’t be where I am. She – and my aunties in my family – they just make the men look weak.”

It has also changed his perception of himself, and of the kind of man he wants to be. “It made me stronger. And it makes me want to be a good dad for when I have kids, even more. I can never turn around and do something like that to my child. I can never not speak to him in years and make him search for me. Never.”

Mim Shaikh: Finding Dad is on BBC Three via BBC iPlayer from today.