So that’s how Sir Ian McKellen acquired a taste for the dramatic

THE FATE of the washed-up celeb is a grim one. After that brief series of charttoppers or a burst of soap bubble stardom, there follow your broken marriages, drug problems, bankruptcies, drunken brawls . . .

Magazines won’t print your picture unless you’re fat. The telly ads dry up, and panel games don’t want you. Even the ritual humiliations of Celebrity Big Brother are out of your reach.

But cheer up. If you think the internet era is cruel, it was a lot worse for celebs in the days of the music hall.

Sir Ian McKellen, exploring his family tree on Who Do You Think You Are? (BBC1), was tickled to discover that a forgotten forebear, a Victorian uncle of his grandmother named Frank Lowe, had been an actor, and rather a good one.

Lowe specialised in melodramas, with titles such as The Two Orphans. McKellen grabbed a script and tried out some dialogue — it was feverish stuff, but he made it sound plausible. There was a glint in his eye, as if he was trying to outdo Uncle Frank’s version.

McKellen’s own stage successes were followed by movie stardom and then CGI fantasy blockbusters, playing wicked Magneto in X Men and the wizard Gandalf in The Lord Of The Rings. No danger that he’ll be reduced to wrestling crocodiles in a tank of insects, on I’m A Celebrity.

But Frank Lowe fared worse. A decade or two after his heyday, he couldn’t get a job in the real theatre, and scraped a living by performing monologues, down the bottom of the playbill, in provincial variety shows.

Nobody paid to see that. Even the performing dogs got better dressing rooms. Uncle Frank’s wife left him, and by his mid-40s he was in the workhouse, where he died of tuberculosis.

Sir Ian sighed over his death certificate, and took comfort from the fact that the coroner recorded Frank’s profession as ‘actor’, a luvvie to the last.

Heartened by this discovery that the theatre was truly in his blood, McKellen donned his blue homburg, wound an iridescent purple scarf around his neck, and swept off to stand in an ancient stone circle in the Lake District, arms aloft. I expect he does that quite a lot.

This is the added pleasure of the show, or at least its best episodes. History is most fascinating when it illuminates the present, and McKellen revealed more about what makes him tick, through his reactions to Uncle Frank’s story, than any amount of chat show interviews.

The interviews with three female murderers in Women Who Kill (C4) were oddly alien, not because they lacked detail, but because the crimes were so remote from British culture, they might as well have happened on the moon.

One mother-of-three, a Native American whose orange prison jumpsuit was offset by Ziggy Stardust eye make-up, abandoned her children in a Navajo reservation, to spend a day squatting on the pavement getting drunk. Then she bashed her cousin’s head flat with a lump of concrete, for calling her a ‘bad mom’.

A Latin American woman, whose older boyfriend had a foot fetish, straddled him on the shagpile carpet and hammered the steel rod of her stiletto heel through his skull and chest, till she was soaked in his blood.

And a pregnant teenage drug addict pushed her dealer boyfriend through a plate glass window, because he didn’t want to come to a family wedding. The broken glass didn’t kill him, but the 17-storey drop did.

All the women talked calmly and rationally to the camera. They all claimed they acted in self-defence, and they all insisted they were not violent.

The documentary couldn’t offer any insights. The police had little idea how to handle the women either — they left the teenage addict in an interview room with her gran and secretly recorded their conversation.

That tape was later used as the basis of her murder confession. Such evidence would never stand up in a UK court. Why it should be allowed in the States, this programme left us none the wiser. For British viewers, it all seemed very odd.