Who Do You Think You Are? (BBC1 Wednesdays) is dedicated to the view that you are your forebears: a view with which the participants in this current series are content to go along. Although it shows the past as another country – sometimes literally – it is one in which the participants find greater or lesser amounts of joy, anguish and support, for the histories of previous generations of their families are pointers, they believe, to their selves. Flesh of their flesh, bone of their bone.

Its fascination is only partly the official agenda of discovery. Other discoveries engage. One is that the participants are mostly English and middle class – all media stars – and reveal the English cringe at being so. Last week’s star, the comedian David Mitchell, was glad his forebears were Scots, although he was also glad they were bourgeois, scorning the peasantry and resenting the aristocracy, making the unexplained comment that “without the middle class there is no comedy”. Chaplin, Marx Brothers, Morecambe and Wise, Billy Connolly?

In a previous programme, Chris Moyles, a BBC Radio 1 DJ, was concerned lest he discover that his family was not Irish (he worried that one branch might have come from Southampton, a phobia also unexplained) but was reassured that they were both solidly Irish and proletarian. The TV presenter Kate Humble claimed a great-grandfather as working class who, as manager of a mid-19th-century Northumberland coalmine, would not have been so regarded by the workers with whom he dealt or, probably, by himself.

Another is how great has been the English emotional revolution in the past half-century – from repression to open display of feeling, like emotive peacocks. Humble cried three times in the course of her discoveries, Moyles once – although that at a site worthy of tears, the killing ground of Ypres. Mitchell didn’t; his discoveries were more cerebral. Humble’s maternal grandfather, an RAF officer shot down and taken prisoner, and a member of the escape committee that tunnelled more than 70 POWs out of Stalag Luft III – the real-life model for The Great Escape – told his family little. “He was,” said Humble’s mother, “of the generation which didn’t talk about themselves. People just didn’t, then.”

Moyles’ grandfather, an Irish nationalist militia man (in the Redmondite, not the IRA, tradition) who joined the British army to fight and be killed when he put his head above the trench, also left no complaint: his local paper honoured him as “one of the pleasantest men in the trenches”. Upper lips were stiff, up and down the classes.

Mitchell’s family were more emotional, but in a Scottish way; John Forbes, a Skye minister, left long descriptions of the public shaming of parishioners taken in adultery and, in an extraordinarily vituperative will, described his wife as feckless and possibly a drunk.

They approach their families, naturally enough, with 21st-century sensibilities. Curiously Mitchell, who has a history degree from Cambridge, seemed least aware of the folly of ahistorical judgment: he gives a gust of right-on disapproval of Forbes’ view of promiscuity, without voicing any thought that desperately poor communities – Skye was as much devastated by potato blight as Ireland – needed another mouth, unattached to family, like the plague. Moyles found it hard to understand how an Irish nationalist could join up, until one of the many local historians on whose amateur dedication this series depends, and who are unfailingly fascinating, told him, simply, that it was the only army there was, and it was pay. Humble was best on this, saying to an ageing man who had been with her POW grandfather on their forced march westwards when Stalag Luft III was evacuated that “our generation [she is 40] had an easy time – thanks to yours”. His upper lip still stiff, he replied, embarrassedly, that “we did our best”. The producers’ decision to choose only media stars to walk down generational lanes – already well explored by diligent researchers – means that the stars can be “natural” (that is, unnaturally relaxed) in front of cameras and microphones: the price is a certain sycophancy in the guides enlisted to peel back the layers of discretion and forgetfulness. Television confers the respect once due to the clerical collar.

How much the genes of forebears determine one’s nature now is itself an academic Ypres. Without daring to enter there, there is pleasure, for the audience as well as the participants, in surrender to an hour’s assumption that they do, a lot. The programme’s best feature, however, may be its use as a back-straightening exercise. Humble with her stoic POW; Moyles with his “pleasantest” foot soldier; even Mitchell with his dour yet upright minister; each found some pause for thought that life, now, was sweeter than then, and they should be glad of it. With that trademark English guilt, and trademark middle-class guffaw of embarrassment, Mitchell said, “I feel ashamed of my frivolous life.” You wanted to say – don’t be ashamed: enjoy! To have been English in the long postwar summer has been among the luckiest things in the world to be. Things, as the Reverend Forbes would have said, can only get worse.

john.lloyd@ft.com
More columns at www.ft.com/lloyd