Wednesday, January 11, 2006

Jeremy Paxman - Just Who Does He Think He is?!

I've just spent an hour watching Jeremy Paxman get put through an emotional wringer on the excellent BBC2 series WHO DO YOU THINK YOU ARE? What a superb piece of TV. He started the programme very nonchalently trying to pretend he frankly wasn't that bothered about it, but by the end you could tell he had been very affected by what he had found out about his ancestors. I lost count of the occasions he welled up and couldn't speak. It's made me want to look into my own family background a little further. I did a family tree a few years ago, having bought some software at PC World but haven't done much more about it. I got back to the late 1700s on my mother's side of the family. My father's is more difficult as his father came down to Essex from Ayrshire in the 1920s. Believe it or not Robbie Burns is supposed to be one of my ancestors. Interestingly there is another Iain Dale, who is a LibDem Scottish Parliamentary candidate in Ayrshire, exactly where my family hail from. Spooky.

2 comments:

Jonathan Sheppard said...

Hmmmm - have the two Iains ever been seen together?

Anonymous said...

Is this like Bill and Ted where there's an "Evil Ian" and a "Good ian" :)