Emma’s journey takes an odd turn at an Irish crossroads
WHO DO YOU THINK YOU ARE? Thursday- BBC1, 9pm
NOSTALGIA, as a wise man pointed out, isn’t what it used to be. Whoever he was, the chances are he was talking about television at the time.
It is scientifically proven that the popular music of yesteryear – by which I mean the ’60s, ’70s and the early part of the ’80s – is incalculably better than the dross that young folk have been listening to in the decades since.
Meanwhile, I suspect that Met Office records would confirm suspicions that all our childhood summers were sunnier and drier.
But I’d like to think that people of my generation have finally woken up to the fact that the TV shows of our era were predominantly awful.
We’ve lived through several years of rose-tinted reminiscences on the BBC and Channel 4 about so-called classic sitcoms and groundbreaking dramas.
By my recollection, though, the reality was quite different. The hit programmes of my youth included such nonsense as Love Thy Neighbour, Triangle, Are You Being Served?, Sapphire & Steel, Manimal and countless others.
Some of them were so bad that I can’t even remember what they were called, presumably because I have blocked them out of my memory.
Yet few programmes were quite as excruciating to watch as Crossroads, the long-running soap set in a Birmingham motel. Even after all this time it is difficult to decide which was the most embarrassing: the wooden acting or the wobbly sets.
Credit where it is due, the producers came up with a couple of interestingly named characters in Shughie McFee and Amy Turtle. But the figure that most people remember is Benny Hawkins, the simple-minded handyman who wore a woolly hat on a 24/7 basis long before U2 guitarist The Edge started doing likewise.
Benny was also known for his touching friendship with Miss Diane, the nearest thing that Crossroads had to a sexpot. The thing that sticks in my mind most, though, is the way he always addressed his boss as ‘Gaffer’, same as if his name was Mick or Frank or something similar.
Before seeing Thursday’s instalment of Who Do You Think You Are?, I was unaware that the word ‘gaffer’ seems to have been in particularly common usage in Birmingham business circles once upon a time. But TV presenter and former model Emma Willis, the programme’s subject and a Brummie herself, had bigger surprises to face.
‘I come from a kind family,’ she said at the outset, ‘and I hope that’s history repeating itself.’
Except, of course, life is seldom that simple. It all started off on a light note when the perfectly coiffed Emma discovered that one of her ancestors had built a business empire founded on flogging hair brushes.
Mind you, things went downhill after that and he ended up dying in a workhouse.
Worse was to come in terms of Emma’s inquiries, though. When it emerged that there was previously unknown Irish ancestry, her journey took her from Dublin to Limerick and back again.
But she made a detour in between to Dunlavin, Co Wicklow, where she discovered that her five-times-great-grandfather had been involved in a horrific attack in the late 18th century on two men suspected of making weapons for the United Irishmen rebels. Even 220 years later, Emma seemed more than a little upset at the news.
It was, she admitted, ‘the polar opposite to what I expected’. Yet things perked up when she discovered that another Irish relative, Michael Kirwan, pioneered the construction of marble altars in churches right across the country.
‘He seemed dedicated to his craft and dedicated to his country, and kind of wanted to show Ireland in the best light possible,’ observed Emma.
‘And that to me seems like a good man. And I needed to find a good man.’
Good man, no doubt. And a very good programme as well.