Who Do You Think You Are?
BBC ONE, 9.00PM; SCOTLAND, 10.45PM
Jonnie Peacock – gold–winning Paralympic sprinter and 2017 Strictly Come Dancing contestant – is the final subject of this year’s run of the BBC’S genealogy strand. Although this series hasn’t delivered the dramatic surprises of, say, Danny Dyer’s discovery of being descended from English kings, it’s rarely less than absorbing.
The ancestors that Peacock looks into resonate strongly with him. The first is his maternal grandfather, a gifted amateur footballer who was prevented by his father from turning professional. Peacock also harboured dreams of a football career until meningitis forced the amputation of his lower right leg.
A second story explores Peacock’s paternal great-great-great-greatgrandmother, Louisa Pope. She was a single mother of four illegitimate children who, in the 1840s, worked as a farm labourer and possibly a prostitute in rural Cambridgeshire. As hardscrabble as Pope’s life was, records show her to be a plucky woman. The light that the episode sheds on other women, whose working conditions were compared to those of slaves, is fascinating.