What to watch
Who Do You Think You Are?
BBC ONE, 9.00PM; WALES, 10.40PM
“My family is fairly boring,” states actress Olivia Colman at the beginning of this week’s episode of Who Do You Think You Are? “We’re English and Irish and my dad’s family have been in Norfolk forever. We don’t really know where my mum’s family came from, although, apparently there was a French woman once…”
Of course, as fans of the ancestry show know statements such as these are as a red rag to a bull for the programme makers and thus Colman swiftly finds that her family’s past isn’t boring at all. Instead the self-confessed “least adventurous person I know” soon finds herself on a quest that heads from the Houses of Parliament to India and the Scottish Highlands taking in adultery, divorce and illegitimacy along the way. The story that really grabs Colman, however, is that of her great-great-greatgrandmother Harriot whose life plays out like the plot of a novel involving childhood tragedy, ever-changing fortunes and loves lost and gained. It helps too that Colman embraces the show’s central conceit: meaning that she’s enthusiastic, occasionally weepy and engaged in finding out what happened next. Sarah Hughes