Do you really want to hurt me? Boy George is sent back to prison
WHO DO YOU THINK YOU ARE? Wednesday, 9pm - BBC1
DUE to an excess of time on my hands, I’ve occasionally wondered how much research is done on Who Do You Think You Are? before a celebrity is even approached to take part.
Maybe I am thinking about it too much.
It could simply be the case that the show’s producers take their chances and hope for the best.
I’d love to know either way because, regardless of how big a star is, any particular episode is likely to be as dull as dishwater unless there are skeletons in the closet or underlying tales of woe.
To be fair, it was always unlikely that Boy George’s family history was going to be boring. Few public figures in recent decades have been as colourful, interesting and engaging.
Apart from having the voice of an angel, the thing that marks George out from his peers is that he can actually string a coherent sentence together as well.
That certainly makes a difference. It might also explain why he has emerged from various controversies down through the years with barely a blot on his copybook.
Just in case anyone was unaware of George Alan O’Dowd’s roots, it was made clear at the outset that they are all on this side of the Irish Sea.
His father’s people came from Tipperary; his mother Dinah is a born-and-bred Dubliner whose accent still has strong traces of its distinguished origins.
Proceedings started in Dinah’s kitchen in London, where she gave a brief outline of her own mother’s early years. Which, frankly, didn’t sound like a barrel of laughs.
It emerged that she had spent ten years of her childhood in the less than salubrious surroundings of the Goldenbridge industrial school.
At just six years old, the young Brigid Kinahan had been put into care by NSPCC inspectors – known locally as ‘the cruelty men’ – after she was found ‘wandering’ the streets of the capital.
But documents uncovered by historian Catriona Crowe showed that Brigid was actually standing outside her family’s slum dwelling at the time.
Much of the programme focused on Thomas Bryan, a relative by proxy through his marriage to George’s great-
aunt. Bryan was one of the socalled ‘Forgotten Ten’, which also included Kevin Barry, executed for republican activity during the War of Independence.
There was a potentially awkward moment when the great man was brought to Kilmainham Gaol to see the sort of conditions Bryan was held in.
He acknowledged that the surroundings were ‘not pleasant’, adding: ‘It’s impossible even to think about what you feel about being in a room like this.’
No mention of the fact that it isn’t so long since George was himself doing porridge in HM Prison Pentonville.
Even more awkward was the sequence filmed at Mountjoy, where Bryan was hanged at eight o’clock in the morning on March 14, 1921, along with cellmate Frank Flood.
The tour guide remarked that the whole thing would have been over in ‘as little as 13 seconds’.
Which, as George pointed out, probably feels like quite a long time if you have a noose around your neck.
Bizarrely, the same guide invited the singer to pull the lever that would have released the trapdoor on the fateful day.
The noise it made, he suggested, was ‘possibly the last sound the individuals would have heard’. Boy George politely declined the offer. I can’t say I blamed him.