JAY BLADES: NO PLACE LIKE HOME
Channel 5, 9pm
The Repair Shop’s Jay Blades heads to Channel 5 for this three-part, history-lite series looking at who trod his manor before he did. Blades goes walkabout in east London, visiting old haunts and meeting historians and characters who deliver nuggets of social history in a Who Do You Think You Are? of Hackney. Blades revisits his first home, where as an infant he and his mother were taken in by her uncle.
In a neighbourhood now noticeably gentrified, Blades learns that the street was among the first to endure German bombing during the First World War. He meets a hairdresser who was friends with the Krays, and a Jewish retiree who fought fascists in Ridley Road. But Blades’s mind is blown by a visit to a Unitarian church whose parishioners once owned slaves from the Caribbean lands of his forefathers.
Dispensing history in tidbits like this, and interspersing it with Blades’s childhood reminiscences, makes the topics accessible and personal, if not particularly rigorous. The show’s biggest asset, however, is Blades, an engaging character whose openness – he recently shared his journey to literacy in middle age in a BBC One documentary – only endears him more to audiences.