In current affairs television, help up to and including legislation is given to producers on this matter: the approach must be "informative", "balanced". Arts television, in the absence of political directives, evolved into a broadly supportive form. Since 1993, I have been an occasional presenter and reporter for the Late Show and since January 1994, the regular writer and presenter of "Late Review", the show's Thursday night critics' forum, which the BBC announced yesterday will continue as a separate year- round series - along with Jeremy Isaacs' Face To Face and other spin offs - when the Late Show comes off air at the end of the year. The "resonance" of the Late Show rests on its impact on television. The two words that have probably been spoken more often in Late Show programmes than any others are "controversial" and "resonant" - the series was there in part to talk about what people were talking about, and to assess cultural impact - so it is appropriate that the Late Show itself should have been both resonant and controversial This cannot be an impartial obituary.

Even though I lost $9,000 from him I'm still somewhat in the second category, I think he really does care about children."For help and advice on adopting a child from another country, contact the Overseas Adoption Helpline on 0171-226 7666.Additional reporting by Liz Searle.. But in their desperation to adopt they have overlooked many of his shortcomings."People who have done business with John fall into two categories," said Dale, who is now reconsidering his opinion, "there are those who call him a crook and those who say, `Well, his heart is in the right place, but he doesn't always dot his i's and cross his t's'. Many prospective parents had misgivings about the fast-talking former preacher from Ashford, Kent, operating across eight East European countries. The money was transferred to Romania, but when Vicki became pregnant and the couple decided not to go through with the adoption, they found it impossible to get their money back.Two years later Davies has yet to refund their $9,000. We did not go to Romania so we had no chance to see how our child's case was processed."He and his wife learnt from Davies that Greta, their child, had previously been adopted by another American family, who backed out of the deal "because her skin was too dark".In 1993, when Dale and Vicki decided to adopt again, Davies asked for a $9,000 down payment.

Now, however, they are starting to query what really happened and are wondering whether their child was illegally sold to them."Was the birth mother of our child coerced into giving up her child?" wondered Dale "This is a question I don't think we can answer We have a document saying that (her) house had burnt down ... They met him through an adoption agency in Massachusetts, and in 1991 they successfully adopted a child from Romania. They were part and parcel of the unpredictable world of DIY adoptions.Dale and Vicki, Americans living in the German town of Tbingen, have seen both sides of John Davies. As an added bonus the family usually got to choose the sex and even the skin colour of the infant.If there were reports about unhappy couples who felt they had been cheated by Davies, prospective parents tended to dismiss these tales as alarmist. Adoption entrepreneurs such as Davies seem to offer a quick, easy and reliable route to foreign adoption. Davies's service was a stark contrast to the cumbersome official routes to adoption. Older parents often found that after a long and anxious wait as their applications were processed through layers of bureaucracy, they ended up not with a "perfect" newborn infant but instead a crippled or emotionally disturbed child.

As a result, Davies has acquired a reputation for being able to provide a stream of very young infants, which is exactly what couples in the West want.Until a few weeks ago, a childless couple who signed up for adoption with Davies could rest assured that in return for about $20,000 it would get a newborn child delivered to its door with a minimum of fuss. Davies discovered that courts are often happy to allow a foreign child to be given up for adoption. Critics allege he has taken pregnant birth mothers to neighbouring countries to speed up adoption.He employs a web of informal contacts, ranging from baby-finders who scour abortion clinics for prospective mothers, to unlicensed private adoption specialists. He spends his time tracking down prospective "birth mothers" in a territory stretching from Kiev in the Ukraine to Odessa on the Black Sea and south to Tirana and Skopje in Albania and Macedonia.There has been a crackdown on foreign adoptions in Eastern Europe following cases of child-selling such as that involving the British couple Adrian and Bernadette Mooney. Eventually, the First Lady, Hillary Clinton, was reported to have interceded with the result that 28 children were adopted by families across the US."Lots of people don't like me," Davies says, "and for some reason the INS [the US Immigration and Naturalization Service] and the State Department are determined to put me out of business, but they don't have anything on me."Davies, who is married with four children, operates from a house in rural Transylvania. (At least 24 families in Belgium, Sweden and Britain lost $26,000 each on adoptions that Aloha had said it would arrange.)Coombs orchestrated a campaign to get the Romanian children to the US.

Meanwhile, Davies's friends in the religious far right went on the offensive.Davies was supported by the Rev Wayne Coombs, a Californian pastor who runs an unlicensed adoption organisation, the Adams Children's Fund. His case was also taken up by Pamela Lacchei, who ran Aloha Adoption Services in Hawaii and Washington state until the authorities shut it down late last year. That discovery led to unproven allegations that Davies had paid the women to have the children. He protests today that these were "acts of constructive fraud", and that he never intended to break the law.Since then he has gone from one controversy to another. He was accused by the US State Department of running a "baby-smuggling/adoption scheme" in 1993 involving 30 children taken across the border from Romania to Hungary for "fattening up" before being sent for adoption to the US. The case became a cause clbre and a case study of the peculiar alliances that the adoption issue has created.The US government refused to accept the children when its diplomats noticed expensive consumer goods in the ramshackle homes of the birth mothers. He was convicted of credit-card and mortgage fraud in the UK while he was running an aid programme for Romania in the early 1990s.