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Who Do You Think You Are?
series 11, episode 2, BBC One, review: 'rumbustious and entertaining'
We were blessed to spend an hour with the irrepressible actor Brian Blessed in the BBC One genealogical series, says Gerard O'Donovan
By Gerard O'Donovan
10:00PM BST 14 Aug 2014
“Well, he was a randy lad, wasn’t he?” chortled Brian Blessed on learning that his great-grandfather had, in the mid-1800s, sired no fewer than 13 children. Not that “chortling” adequately describes the pneumatic boom of a Blessed laugh, especially when it’s married to a line like: “Nothing wrong with him, eh? He didn’t need a purple pill, did he? Ha-ha-ha-haaaah!”
Blessed was the entertaining subject of Who Do You Think You Are?, a show that despite being 11 series in still has the power to captivate every now and again. Often with family histories that aren’t exactly star-spangled. Not that the 77-year-old actor and adventurer (he made three attempts to scale Everest and holds the record for being the oldest man to reach the magnetic North Pole) was expecting to unearth prestigious forebears.
“I’m not looking for crowns and coronets. I’m looking for humanity,” he enunciated at the outset. Which was probably just as well given that the ancestral story unfurled for him was rooted largely in workhouses, penury and plucky survival against the odds.
None of this derailed the freight train of rumbustious joie-de-vivre that is Blessed. Every expert and archivist was greeted like a dear old friend. Even the dead were embraced with gusto: “I can feel them. It starts sinking into your DNA molecules. You can feel them growing within you.”
It wasn’t tragedy but the happy final years of his great-grandfather Jabez – a man who survived Dickensian levels of neglect and abuse to emerge eventually into the sunny uplands of domestic comfort and hyper-fecund familial bliss – that finally reduced Blessed to tears. For the first time in his life, so he said.
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But that’s the beauty of Who Do You Think You Are? At its best it reveals far more about those taking part than their ancestry. Blessed met his forebear’s misfortunes with an unself-conscious, if predictably actorly concern. But with an irrepressible optimism, too. Here was a man who did not wallow in tragedy but sought out every available crumb of hope, even for the dead. You could just picture him clinging to an icy mountainside, or facing into an Arctic gale, refusing to give up, convinced that triumph is but the very next step away.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/tvandradio/tv-and-radio-reviews/11035228/Who-Do-You-Think-You-Are-series-11-episode-2-BBC-One-review-rumbustious-and-entertaining.html
