Eamonn: My family tree got Beeb axe

WHO Do You Think You Are? has featured 128 stars since it launched in 2004, taking us on extraordinary emotional journeys across the centuries.

While some celebrities have sobbed their way through agonising revelations about how their ancestors suffered through wars, famines and the Holocaust, others have been delighted to discover they are directly descended from royalty (well, just Danny Dyer, actually, but it was a good one). So you can imagine Eamonn Holmes’s excitement when producers wanted to rummage through his Belfast ancestors’ lives. But what did they find? Farming, farming and more farming. In fact, so boring was the dirt they dug up on both sides of his family, that he was dropped from the hit BBC1 show, in 2010. Eamonn, host of ITV’s This Morning, explains: “They interviewed me for two days and got all this documentation from me.

“But they never, ever got back to me. That was seven years ago.”

The TV star joked: “We come from a very boring family.”

Speaking on This Morning, his wife Ruth Langsford agreed, laughing that he was indeed, “very dull”.

But at least he’s in good company. Michael Parkinson was dropped for similar reasons in 2009, while Cherie Blair suffered the same fate in 2014.