FIVE MINUTES WITH... SUE PERKINS

Who Do You Think You Are? is back and tracing her family history first this series is comedian and TV presenter Sue Perkins. What’s it been like to unearth her history, and what are the biggest discoveries she made?

WHY DID IT FEEL THE RIGHT TIME TO DO THE PROGRAMME?

I’ve been thinking about it since I lost my dad. When you lose a parent or a family member, it feels like the hot air balloon that you’ve been flying in, suddenly, someone’s snipped one of the cables. There’s a sense of precariousness.

For me to recalibrate, I wanted to find out a bit more about my past, but also him. Why am I the person I am? What impact has my ancestry had on my emotional peccadilloes, my thinking, my behaviour?

YOU FIND OUT A LOT ABOUT YOUR GRANDFATHER?

I associate the Victorian period with something remote – it’s something I studied, something we read, and it’s not touchable. Because my grandfather was 60-plus when my dad was born, of course, he’s very much a child of that time, but I never really fully embraced the fact that that was where he was from.

The workhouse, which is where he was an orphan, is for me an unimaginably antiquated thing, and yet just two generations back, there he was.

It was incredibly shocking. Just the word “workhouse”, it’s emblematic of a level of poverty and suffering that you hope we’re beyond, although perhaps not.

He went from being this stern, bearded, ancient man in photographs, this lost figure from another era, to being really fleshed out, and me having a lot of sympathy for him, feeling so heartbroken at the level of loss he sustained when he was just a child. He lost three sets of parents – a step-mum, a mum and a dad – and was then kept apart from his other siblings.

Just two generations back, that’s how people were living. And that’s the degree of pain they had.

MANY OF YOUR ANCESTORS WERE INTERNED OR INCARCERATED?

My paternal grandfather was incarcerated in a workhouse and then in service. My grandfather was in a camp, and then my greatgrandfather was in a camp. My great-grandmother’s family were all in camps, both German camps and Soviet camps.

WHAT LESSONS DID FINDING OUT ABOUT YOUR FAMILY TEACH YOU?

For everyone that’s bereaved, you struggle to make sense of the world. For me, the way that I’ve come to that reckoning is to take the things that they gave you that were helpful and made you better and amplify them.

I know that my greatgrandma crossed horrific, grim mudflats for an eternity and then got on a boat, and then came to London and lived in a slum and started a new life. She did that. And that’s in me. And I should rise to every challenge I have and be grateful, because I don’t have to live in that environment. I feel lucky, because I think they were inspirational folk.

DID YOU FIND IT TO BE QUITE AN EMOTIONAL PROCESS?

It was a ride. It was a really heavy, brilliant, painful, extraordinary ride.

Who Do You Think You Are?, BBC1 at 9pm on Thursday.