Every family has at least one embarrassing relative. In tonight’s Who Do You Think You Are?, comedian Jack Whitehall discovers that he has a few. Luckily, he can see the funny side of this.
In a first for the series where celebrities investigate the lives of their ancestors, Jack teams up with his father, Michael. As anyone who watches their chat show Backchat will know, having his dad there gives Jack a target for his self-deprecating brand of humour.
The shtick is simple: Jack is a self-hating “posho”, while his tweed-wearing pater sees no shame in having been to boarding school and drinking champagne with lunch on a Monday.
As he sees it, he is a hero, stepping in to save his son’s career. Unfortunately, Jack jokes, they are related.
Except they weren’t always rich. Michael’s grandfather paid his own boarding school fees because his parents couldn’t afford them, and they don’t know where that cash came from. Their search takes them to 1830s Wales.
Delving into family history in public is high risk — you hope you will be related to a hero. Unfortunately for Jack, he ends up with a scumbag. Even worse, a Tory scumbag. There he was, looking for a working-class relative to dispel his toffy image, and he gets a prominent Conservative who ruthlessly opposed the Chartist movement in its fight for voting rights. As Jack says, every show needs a villain. You just don’t want them to be related to you.
Jack has a pained look on his face for most of the show. The Welsh historians make no effort to sugarcoat their findings, describing his relative with a Welsh word that sounds very much like “dickhead”.
Jack sympathises more with the people his ancestor repressed, imposing modern social norms on the past and imagining that the Welsh Whitehall relative wouldn’t have felt great about his actions. Looking for an outlet for his disappointment, he blames his dad. That’s what Michael’s there for.
Who Do You Think You Are? is on BBC One at 9pm tonight.
