Searching in earnest for noble (and nice) ancestors
What do celebrities seek in a distant ancestor? The makers of Who Do You Think You Are? (BBC Two) crave sensational headlines and tend to get them. More often the participants themselves pray for forebears who can confirm their sense of self. They’re not so much panning for gold as panning for goodness.
Step forward Emma Willis, who earlier this week ushered a bunch of not-that-famous clots and cleavages into the Big Brother house. She was presumably included to extend the genealogy show’s fan base down a generation, which maybe explains the how-to shots of her using the search engine of an ancestry website.
Wanting her family tree to consist of solid Brummie working-class stock, she got her wish thanks to James Gretton, a Victorian dealer in hairbrushes who went bankrupt, collapsed his family into penury and died in a workhouse.
But another branch took Willis over the water to Ireland – we never found out how they later ended up in England. There, her great-great-greatgreat-great grandfather was a Protestant landowner called Richard Fowler who played his part in suppressing uppity Catholics. A newspaper report went into bloody details.
“I come from good people,” said Willis, “and I feel like I’ve found somebody who wasn’t so good.” Would this local enforcer of the Orange supremacy have stayed his hand had he known that, more than two centuries later, he would be disowned on national television by the presenter of Big Brother? One for what-if historians to ponder.
Happily for Willis, a granddaughter of this undesirable ancestor righted the wrong by marrying a pioneering Catholic stonemason and a protector of workers’ rights. “So he was a good man?” she asked one of the show’s walk-on genealogical researchers hopefully.
Michael Kirwan put his name to a subscription for the statue of Daniel O’connell, the proselytiser for Irish self-rule. “I kind of feel like I take a little bit of the credit for it,” mused Willis at its foot in Dublin’s main street. She came across as a good person herself. But Who Do You Think You Are? does bring out the solipsist.
Top of the Lake is growing odder by the hour. The first series set a high benchmark for weirdness. This time round, the mise-en-scène is a brothel staffed by indentured Asian sex workers, one of whom washed up in a suitcase on Bondi Beach last week.
It’s all jolly horrible, but also horribly jolly. The body of the victim was carved up by a forensic pathologist called Ray with a sideline in beta-male wit. “If I had a bigger penis I would have tried to marry you,” he gently advised Robin Griffin (Elisabeth Moss). There was no answer to that, and plenty more morgue repartee where that came from.
Meanwhile the self-help group of risible males convened again for more café banter about paying for sex. In Top of the Lake’s teeming canvas, men mainly hail from the bottom of the barrel – including Robin’s wastrel ex: in a spectacular flashback scene in New Zealand, her wedding dress was incinerated in a gleeful lakeside rite.
It’s barely easier to warm to the women. Robin’s gigantic sidekick Miranda (Gwendoline Christie) has wandered in from the circus. “For most people I’m too much,” she confided. Written especially for Christie, it’s a bizarre part which a stronger actress might struggle to flesh out too.
Meanwhile Robin took time out to be lectured by the aggro-feminist neo-lesbian Julia (Nicole Kidman, all wire wool and poniards), who has raised a paint-stripping straight-talker in her adoptive daughter Mary (Alice Englert). “So you’re a policewoman,” Mary said when she met her birth mother. “That’s hilarious.”
Robin is, in fact, the only character in Top of the Lake who is in no sense hilarious. The still centre in a hectic parade of gargoyles and fruitbats, as played so enthrallingly by Moss she has the wherewithal to anchor any encounter. “I think you’re amazing,” she told her newfound daughter. While you might not have concurred, it would have taken a stony heart to be unmoved.
Top of the Lake certainly slips down nicely, so why am I not quite buying it? There’s a credibility deficit. It feels like Dickens does Down Under, each caricature trapped in their own separate psychodrama.
Who Do You Think You Are? ★★★ Top of the Lake: China Girl ★★★