This weekend Sunday Night looks at Elvis and the boy without a face.
A Face for Yaha
He’s an adorable little boy with a big, effervescent personality and loving parents. But Yahya was born without a face. Sunday Night viewers fell in love with the Moroccan toddler when we first told his story last year. Now Yahya has been granted an extraordinary opportunity to live more normally. A crack team of Melbourne surgeons have dedicated themselves to an incredibly challenging, high-risk assignment – what one calls ‘cranio-facial neurosurgery at its extreme’ – to give Yahya something we all take for granted – a face. Lead surgeon Professor Tony Holmes said: “I think this one is about as difficult as it gets. A 9.5-out-of-10 degree of difficulty. Yahya may not die if we don’t operate but he might if we do.” In this enthralling, emotion-charged Sunday Night special, Dr Andrew Rochford takes us inside Yahya’s world and the inspirational effort to transform his deformities. We’ll meet the irrepressible Melbourne woman who worked to bring the toddler and his parents to Australia and into the hands of the same surgery team that deftly separated conjoined twins Trishna and Krishna. “I don’t see a deformed child I just see this beautiful little child, a beautiful little soul, that’s all I see,” Fatima Baraka said. We’ll hear the hopes and fears of Yahya’s parents and the concerns of doctors as long and complicated surgery turns into a marathon of skill and precision. And in the end a happy little boy will smile for the first time.
Back in the Building
Las Vegas was the scene of Elvis’ spine-tingling, explosive comeback in the late ‘60s and he came to dominate the city like no other performer before or since. Now The King is making another comeback and Elvis is all anyone’s talking about in the gaudy, flashy entertainment capital. Australia’s and indeed one of the world’s biggest Elvis fans, former Wiggle Greg Page, has assembled a stellar cast of Elvis’ closest – including former wife Priscilla, daughter Lisa Marie and good mate Jerry Schilling – as he guest reports this inside account of how Vegas is getting all shook up about Elvis Aaron Presley once more. Greg’s got one of the biggest Elvis collections going but even his impressive array of memorabilia is dwarfed by the material assembled and displayed in the rejuvenated and re-launched hotel where Elvis lived and performed. There are remarkable, deeply personal accounts from a remarkable time in music history and plenty of the King’s greatest hits.
Sunday at 8.45pm on Seven.
