Long Lost Family: What Happened Next is on TONIGHT as Davina McCall revisits families whose lives have changed

LONG Lost Family: What Happened Next premieres TONIGHT (Monday, July 29, 2019) and will revisit some of the relatives, who have been brought together through the ITV series.

In the past nine years, the hit programme has reunited loved ones and now fans of the show get a chance to see how far they have come since reconnecting. Here is what you need to know…

When is Long Lost Family: What Happened Next on?

The tear-jerking series launches TONIGHT (Monday, July 29, 2019), more than a month after the first episode of Long Lost Family season nine aired, from 9:00pm to 10pm on ITV.

In this series, eleven of Long Lost Family’s most compelling stories are revisited and viewers get an insight into life after the first meeting.

How easy is it to let a stranger into your family? Is a question the show bosses hope to answer with this spin-off show.

Long Lost Family has reunited more than 200 people with their missing relatives but meeting is just the beginning.

How many episodes are there in Long Lost Family: What Happened Next?

Three episodes make up this series, with each lasting an hour and airing every Monday for the next three weeks.

More than 400 people from across the UK have been in touch with the Long Lost Family team, asking for help to find a missing loved one.

What happens in episode one of Long Lost Family: What Happened Next?

In episode one, the Long Lost Family team catch up with Julie Roberts, who reunited with her birth mother Marion last year.

Julie was adopted as a baby and although she had a good upbringing she always longed to meet her biological mother.

Marion had Julie when she was only 18-years-old and explained on the show how difficult it had been for her to give her up.

She told the programme: “You're a mother, doesn’t matter what age you are, you’re a mother and that’s your child.”

In What Happened Next Julie and Marion reveal they speak on the phone each day and visit one another regularly.

Despite spending half a century apart, they discovered they had a lot in common, including having butterfly tattoos on their right shoulders, and both had dogs named Simba.

The second story sees Christina Barlow travel 500 miles to Colombia to visit her birth parents, Encarnacion Carrenŏ and Alcibiades.

They had given her up due to extreme poverty but were delighted when she found them with the help of a charity, which reunites adopted Colombia children with their families in 2018.

Christina admitted to What Happened Next that she has struggled to communicate long distance with her birth parents because of the language barrier.

“I spent less than a week in Colombia in total. It definitely didn’t feel like enough time to get to know them,” she said.

In order to have a better relationship with them both, Christina has been learning Spanish and decides to travel to Colombia to celebrate her birthday with them for the first time.

On her 29th birthday she and Encarnacion return to the orphanage where Christina was born – it is an emotional visit for both of them.