Two is returning to one of Britain’s strangest charity scandals with a new three-part series, The Mother of All Cons, putting Jean O’Brien and Megan Bhari back in focus. The programme revisits Believe in Magic, the charity the mother and daughter set up in 2012 and which was later found to have been based on lies.

That search is rising now because Bhari’s name once carried the charity’s public image. She was 16 when Believe in Magic launched, and her claim that she was living with a brain tumour helped draw support from celebrities, including One Direction, and even a Downing Street reception in 2015, where David Cameron called her efforts “extraordinary”.

Believe in Magic was presented as a charity for seriously ill and terminally ill children, and it did deliver trips, celebrity meet-and-greets, family holidays and other once-in-a-lifetime events. Families who used it say they received real help and real experiences through the organisation, which makes the deception around its founder’s story harder to flatten into a simple fraud case. Public appeals in 2015 reportedly brought in around £120,000, money that gave the group reach far beyond the small circle around Jean O’Brien and her daughter.

The trouble was always at the centre of the charity’s appeal. An inquest later found there was no evidence that Bhari had ever had a brain tumour, even though the illness claim had been the foundation of the organisation’s rise. The same inquest said she had fatty liver disease and had received treatment for an opioid addiction. Bhari died in 2018 from a heart issue, not from cancer, and the gap between the story told in public and the facts found later is what gives the series its pull.

Jamie Bartlett, whose work helped bring the case back into view, said Bhari was extraordinary “but not of the thing she claimed, nor to the severity she claimed.” That is the blunt truth at the heart of The Mother of All Cons: a charity that genuinely helped some children was built around an illness claim that did not stand up, and the manhunt for the truth has moved from scandal to screen. The remaining question is not whether the lie existed; it is how much of the charity’s good work can be separated from it now that the story is being retold for a new audience.