Harry Potter and the curse of his great-grandad’s tragic suicide
Our ancestors’ lives can echo our own in eerie ways, as Daniel radcliffe discovered when he saw a photo of his great-great-grandad on Who Do You Think You Are? (BBC1). They might have been identical twins.
But there are even stranger coincidences in the Harry Potter actor’s past, as I discovered when — intrigued by one story uncovered on the show — I did some additional digging.
Daniel’s great- grandfather, Samuel, was a diamond merchant who took his own life after a raid on the safe in his Hatton Garden offices left him facing bankruptcy.
Delving into the Daily Mail archives, I found the report on Samuel’s inquest in 1936 . . . headlined ‘Dead Man’s Curse In Book’.
His suicide note, written in a notebook and addressed to his beloved wife, raie, was read out for the coroner’s court.
We saw the note on screen, too, and Daniel wept as he read from it aloud, but this part was omitted: ‘May the people who are responsible for breaking up my happy home have it on their heads all the days of their lives.’
How uncanny that an actor known around the world for a series of films that revolve around books and curses should be linked to such a tale in real life. Back for a
16th season, this absorbing historical show is only as good as its guests. This year there are some big names, including actress Kate Winslet, who called the producers and begged to be included.
But she’ll have trouble beating Daniel’s story for sheer heartache. Exploring his father’s family tree, he was presented with a package of letters from his great-great-uncle Ernest, who fought in the trenches during World War I.
They traced his service on the Western Front in vivid detail: stricken with frostbite during the war’s first bitter winter in 1914, praying for food parcels from home, and hit in the leg by shrapnel.
Abruptly, in May 1916, the letters stopped. This is a merciless programme and the stories are so often tragic. Ernest was killed by a shell that wiped out his wooden bunker.
There’s always a danger that an episode will become no more than a paper-chase, as the guest treks from library to archive to museum in search of documents.
To vary it, the director had Daniel sitting down with historians in more unexpected places. The deserted cafe on Southend seafront was a good choice. The nearby bus shelter seemed less suitable.
Some of the choices on Nadiya’s Time To Eat (BBC2) were downright bizarre — such as pouring a can of spaghetti hoops into her fresh fish- and- vegetable pie. The idea of the series is to demonstrate recipes that are quick and easy, and it’s certainly undeniable that opening a tin of flaccid pasta in tomato gloop is no hardship. Eating it is, though.
Once again there was a pointless visit to a factory, this time to see how Marmite is made. We didn’t learn much, except that the Bake Off star is really tiny — a shade under 5ft, in fact.
Shown around the site by a bloke who must have been about 6ft 6in tall, Nadiya looked like positively diminutive.
Still, she’s bubbling with ideas in the kitchen, and you don’t have to taste her food to see what a talented cook she is. ‘Tuckee tuckee!’ she cried, as she folded a platter of pastry around a sticky pudding.
‘Now I can get on with an array of other things,’ she declared, ‘like housework.’
I don’t imagine that industrious Nadiya ever really puts her feet up.
WASHING MACHINE OF THE WEEK: Mama, the matriarch of her Mbendjele family, did her laundry in a rainstorm on Extreme Tribe: The Last Pygmies (C4). Sadly, their way of life will soon be gone for ever. We’ve been watching a slice of human history.