WHO DO YOU THINK YOU ARE?
BBC One, 9pm; not Wales
Tonight on the family history show, game show master and novelist Richard Osman learns all about his long matrilineal heritage in Brighton. The episode begins with a tender focus on his grandfather, Fred. We hear the story of Fred bursting into tears after working to secure a place at a grammar school, only to be unable to take it up because of his family’s deep poverty. Osman and his mother are visibly affected as they relate
the tale of Fred’s time in the military, with his mother talking about how she didn’t meet her father, stationed in Burma, until she was three years old. It’s elegiac stuff, with Osman describing the “perfect male role model”, whose belief that the “route out of poverty is education” would ultimately inspire him to go to Cambridge.
But Frank isn’t the only character of note. Osman visits the Parish Church of St Nicholas, looking at the
“X” marks in the marriage register that served as his illiterate ancestors’ signatures. The most excitement comes when the crime novelist learns that his four-times great grandparent Gabriel Gillam was a prime witness in a grisly murder that inspired both broadsheet and ballad. The story ends sadly, with the workhouse tragedy that is shared by so many of our ancestors, but it’s well worth telling.