Who Do You Think You Are?
BBC One
★★★☆☆
Top of the Lake: China Girl
BBC Two
★★★★☆
Emma Willis, of course familiar to you as the host of Channel 5’s Big Brother (just my little joke), broke tear-shedding records in Who Do You Think You Are? This was not in volume, but speed. Within five minutes she was crying, and not for a death in infancy or a transportation to a colony, but over her late grandmother Edna. The tears were indicative. Other subjects have climbed their family trees in search of talent or status prefiguring their own. Willis just wanted to find people as good as her nan.
As part of that, she was keen to discover evidence of hard physical work. I last heard the term “grafter” used this often when I interviewed Ricky Tomlinson — and was subsequently amused to watch a Royle Family in which Caroline Aherne and Craig Cash had placed his “I’m a grafter, me” speech into the mouth of slacker Jim.
Willis did veer off track in Ireland. She discovered her five-times great-grandfather, Richard Fowler of Boggy Meadows, was a “gentleman” — that is a landowner who did not work for a living. (“I expected working-class grafters.”) Ever so slightly, her humble head turned. Her jaw dropped theatrically, however, when it was revealed he was a Protestant bully who had beaten up, stabbed and tortured a couple of republican-minded blacksmiths. In a field of sheep, Willis lamented having found an ancestor who “maybe” wasn’t so good.
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Happily all was redeemed on the other side of her father’s Irish ancestry by an industrious artisan genius named Michael Kirwan who had introduced marble altars to Catholic churches in the 1830s. More than that, he had stood up to the most popular politician of the day, Daniel O’Connor, when “the liberator” dared to condemn trade unionism. When she read his death notice Willis wept again even though, as she conceded, she knew he was dead.
One day WDYTYA? will feature someone related to an IRA thug. The family story will be redeemed by the discovery of another relative who is a progressive member of the Anglo-Irish ascendancy. Or perhaps not. If you were uncertain who Willis was, however, you knew by the end of this programme: a girl with the right values.
Talking of “girls”, notice how even the title of Jane Campion’s Top of the Lake: China Girl is designed to make us feel bad. The murdered prostitute at the centre of the new case is Thai not Chinese, and surely we should not call her a “girl”. Saying the title makes us racist and sexist.
Even I, Top of the Lake’s greatest fan, felt last night’s initial flashback was a little unlikely. Elisabeth Moss’s detective, Robin, discovered on her wedding day that her fiancé was a pot-smoking cheat. She subsequently burnt her wedding dress atop a funeral pyre. Robin’s famed ability to read others must have its dyslexic moments.
Still, the episode was full of great comic moments, blissful acting and real insights into men — Australian men, anyhow. The good news is that, in Ray, the cheeky pathologist, we have finally met a decent guy. He is in a gay relationship, but what the hell: I identified with him gratefully.
andrew.billen@thetimes.co.uk