Homecoming for Boy George
WHO DO YOU THINK YOU ARE? BBC1, TONIGHT, 9PM
A LOT of the reality shows currently clogging our schedules like the TV equivalent of giant fatbergs have been accused of being exploitative and crass.
They also feature younger people so the usual argument suggests that these inexperienced types are simply put through the emotional wringer for our leering, intrusive edification.
Which, as it happens, is an accusation that could be equally levelled at Who Do You Think You Are? (BBC1, tonight, 9pm).
But because the nature of this genealogical trawl through the murky family backgrounds of well known people tends to appeal to older participants with an older audience, the show tends to escape such scrutiny.
This idea of forcing even veteran performers into shedding tears – whether those tears are real or not – for our delectation is a rather grubby one.
It was also a cynical piece of TV hackery which former participant Chris Moyles mocked when he spoke of his own experience on the show and joked that “I didn’t go to Auschwitz. Pretty much everyone goes there, whether they’re Jewish or not.”
It was, as you can probably guess, a rather incendiary remark.
But he also had a legitimate point about the way the programme can use tenuous links to force cheap tears from people, simply because that is what the format demands.
As it happens, Moyles spent most of his programme back here in Ireland, where his family is from and so it is tonight as well, with the Boy George episode.
George O’Dowd, to give him his proper name, has always been a fascinating character – from his days as the gender-bending (as it was then known) front man with Culture Club to his work as a DJ and author, along with the usual rock star escapades, he always gives good copy.
In tonight’s episode he takes a page out of Moyles’s book by joking at the start that it “could be sad and my mascara may run” but when he gets to these shores, his story becomes one which will be familiar to many Irish people.
Along the way, he discovers that some of his family’s legends are inaccurate.
His grandmother, for instance, wasn’t found as a stray urchin wandering the streets of Dublin, as he had been told.
She had, instead, been effectively kidnapped by the State because she came from a poor family and was sent to the nuns.
He is also shown the letter his great-uncle, Thomas Bryan, wrote from Kilmainham just before he was executed in the wake of the 1916 Rising.
Even the normally garrulous George, we learn, can be stuck for words.