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There aren’t many TV shows that I’d actively like to be on any more. Taskmaster was the zenith and most things after that would be a let down. I’d love a crack at Would I Lie To You? And QI might be fun and I really enjoyed working with Jon Richardson and Lucy Beaumont, but of the ones I haven’t done and that I’m clearly not on the list for, I can’t think of many that I’d be chomping at the bit for.
But I would really love to be on Who Do You Think You Are? Sadly I’d need to get a lot more famous for that to happen (which is not something I am keen to happen) and also they tend to have guests who are rather lovely and likeable (again something that’s not likely to be the case for me) but the show is right in my wheelhouse. Other comedians have set the bar high and most of them seem to be related to royalty and I don’t think that’s going to happen for me (though if you could find the links then we’re all almost certainly related to all historical characters from 500 years ago), but the show is also fun when it dips into the more prosaic lives of people only a couple of generations back. It’s extraordinary that it works as a TV show as even for recent searches all they have to show is a photo or two and some documents, but the production team somehow manage to make a birth certificate or census entry exciting.
I hadn’t slept well and am trying to make Tuesdays my down days, so I caught up with a few recent episodes of the show today. Ralf Little’s was great - he is famous and also a very lovely man and his family tree threw up a nice variety of stories and Matt Lucas’ one was pretty harrowing, as he found out about the many relatives he lost in the Holocaust, one of whom had shared accommodation with the Frank family, just before they went into hiding (and maybe met some of them again in Belsen where most of them were to die). The genius of the show is the emotional impact that these family stories have and having lovely, silly Matt Lucas facing up to the horrors of the past is very affecting, but this one is a beautifully made programme with positive amongst the gut-wrenching negatives.
Thanks to a kind man called Adrian, I have a pretty detailed synopsis of many of my ancestors, including the wonderfully named Donkin Dover, so maybe I don’t need to be on the TV show. But it’s an utterly charming programme and nearly always interesting and usually better when the people involved are not big historical characters (as exciting and headline making as that is) but just regular folk who they manage to find a little bit about.
I took Phoebe to football training in the evening sunshine. As we walked back around a field of wheat with the sun warming our back and the green trees visually pinging against the blue sky I felt very lucky to live here. First good thing that’s happened in six years, but it’s a start.
