Talking Telly: Get a bit of history, drama from Who Do You Think You Are?’

The eighth series of the celebrity genealogy show “Who Do You Think You Are?” bows Monday night on BBC1 with Bruce Forsyth looking into the history of his ancestors – and according to the preview blurb released beforehand, he particularly focuses on a great-grandfather who had been alleged to be a bigamist who died at sea.

This snippet of info pretty much epitomizes what the show’s stock trade has been in – taking a celebrity who has either a bit of controversy themselves or with their family line, sending them off on travels all over the world to look up records or finding buildings where their ancestors lived, and generally finding a story that, for better or worse, usually ends in some measure of tears.

Actually, the tears part has become a sort of a side joke to some of the people who appear on the show, generally the ones who don’t have some sort of quest to either find out exactly how their grandparents or great-grandparents died in WWII or in the Holocaust or who don’t have their own sad histories that end up being uplifted by finding they have upstanding ancestors a few generations back. Indeed, not every show is depressing.

David Mitchell went to Scotland to find out why his family, about three generations back, gave up their sheep farming and seemly randomly moved to southern England, and the greatest angst he suffered was in a funny sequence where he tried to get wireless Internet for research whilst sitting beside a remote-looking Scottish loch and launched into one of his famous rants. Barbara Windsor, who did have a bit of a personal journey in trying to find out about the family of the father who abandoned her as a teen, spent most of her episode finding joy that she is not only a proper Eastender, but that a branch of her family has their picture printed on the cigarette machine in a pub. David Tennant had a great time at a Londonderry football game after finding out that his grandfather was a football star who had a cap for Scotland and then married a Northern Irish beauty queen. Jeremy Clarkson went on a quest to find someone in his family that would be mechanically inclined, I guess to justify Top Gear to the haters.

But there’s an awful lot of melodrama and heartache on most of the episodes. If you want to get right depressed and spend an evening losing a bit of faith in mankind, watch Jerry Springer’s ep where he finds where both of his grandmothers died in the Holocaust, including one who was amongst the first gassed in Poland. Springer’s own parents lost their shoe business in Germany and were amongst the last refugees to receive asylum in the UK before WWII started, and despite finding a distant cousin at the end whose own branch managed to make it to Israel and survive, it’s hard not to cry yourself along with Jerry as the credits roll. And Stephen Fry’s episode isn’t much cheerier in that regard – he went to the ghetto where his great-grandparents were deported to from Vienna and died.

Kim Cattrell might have the most famous episode of Who Do You Think You Are? and her ep largely inspired Lisa Kudrow to produce an American version on NBC. Cattrell is from Liverpool and had always wondered what happened to her grandfather, who randomly disappeared when her mother was a young child and left behind a wife and three daughters in extreme poverty. On the show, she found out that he simply moved to Manchester, committed bigamy about a year later, had more kids, served in the British Navy and ended up emigrating to Australia. In the end, Kim’s mother and sisters not only saw the only existing pictures of the father they barely knew, but were able to make contact with their half-siblings in Australia.

However, there’s a lot of lost black sheep finding their whiter-hued flock. In a very weepy but happy episode, Davina McCall traced back the French family she felt she’d lost with her estrangement from her mother and found that her great-grandfather was a very highly esteemed head of the Parisian police force who took a courageous stand in the Dreyfus treason trial. She also found that an ancestor on her father’s side was one of the main stonemasons of Windsor Castle and later built Upton Park. Patsy Kensit’s father was part of an infamous London crime syndicate and spent time in prison, and she said she’d lived her life with the shadow of his criminal past. So she found some sort of redemption in finding a direct ancestor who was a vicar and who ran a campaign to help the plight of the poor in the 1830′s.

Not every episode is the most interesting in the world, but in all it’s not bad at all. And it’s an excellent way to learn a lot of English history. Between Tennant’s discovery of his family’s roots in the Northern Irish troubles, and Chris Moyles discovering the roots of his grandmother in the Irish slums, to the Indian roots of Meera Syal, to the extraordinarily complicated family line of Boris Johnson (who comes from pretty much every conceivable place in Europe) you learn quite a bit. Plus it gives you your own idea of how to trace back your own ancestry, without the benefit of BBC researchers.