Read ’em and sweep, Joe
COMEDIAN Joe Lycett is distantly related to a buffalo. He learns this tonight on WHO DO YOU THINK YOU ARE? (BBC1, 9pm). To be strictly accurate, Joe’s great grandad, Robert William Wilkinson, was a member of the Nottingham lodge of the Royal Antediluvian Order of Buffaloes, a charitable organisation which thrives to this day. But obviously this isn’t quite as interesting as if Joe were distantly related to a buffalo of the literal four-legged kind, so, yes, I deliberately misled you in that intro to grab your attention.
Sorry, but it was that or just start today’s column with: “It’s caramel week on THE GREAT BRITISH BAKE OFF (C4, 8pm).”
I’ll talk about caramel week on Bake Off in a moment – unless I forget, in which case please take my word for it: that’s definitely what it is – but for now let’s stick with Joe Lycett’s family tree because some of the stuff he learns tonight is genuinely powerful. He finds out, for instance, that this Robert chap’s father, also called Robert, had worked as a chimney sweep when he was just 10. He’d also lived in the local pub with his grandparents, his mum and dad’s place already overrun with countless siblings.
Joe gets the impression the 10-year-old Robert was not having a great life. “Even though it sounds Dick van Dykey and fun, I’m not sure it would have been,” he says.
Any doubts to that effect are then dispelled when an expert tells him of the horrors young sweeps were put through.
Years later, this Robert joined the Royal Marines, and travelled far and wide. On hearing this, Joe perks up a bit.
But he then makes some even darker discoveries.
Elsewhere tonight, in C4’s MURDER ISLAND (9.15pm), we’re left with just two of the amateur detective pairings competing for the £50,000 prize. And there’s about to be a big breakthrough, thanks to the tracking-down of the victim’s father, or at least the actor hired to play him.
He looks distraught, this poor man, as you can well imagine, given how much larger a fee he could have earned if he’d not had to wait until episode five to make an appearance.
Before that, at 8pm, also on C4 (apologies, I should have mentioned this earlier), it’s caramel week on The Great British Bake Off.
And although everyone’s strictly forbidden from uttering the following brand name, what the bakers are asked to make is basically Twixes.
Yes, really! Twixes! As in the plural of Twix.
That’s assuming, of course, that Twix isn’t already plural, which I guess it might be. If that’s the case, what they’re asked to make is more than one Twik.