Afternoon:
10°c
Poor Michael Parkinson. He claims he was "gutted" the other day when the makers of the BBC series on genealogy, Who Do You Think You Are? told him that "my story was so boring they had to cancel the entire project".
That says more about them than the interest of Mr P's great grandparents. For the programme makers, there has to be a sensational aspect to genealogy: the ancestor who died in Bedlam or (every genealogy-bore's prize exhibit) a forebear hanged for sheep stealing.
But practically everyone's family is interesting. Simply by virtue of inhabiting a different time, a different world from ours, our forebears exert a powerful pull to the past.
And the thing to remember is that the past starts a generation ago or even two: history isn't just about the long-dead.
While our own family is a useful handle on the past, so is everyone else's.
I can never pass an old people's home without eyeing up the residents as living repositories of all manner of interesting information that will die with them.
If I had my way, no elderly Londoner would go lonely; they'd be harassed on a regular basis by pupils from the local secondary school asking how their mother did her washing. In London, a historic melting pot, their stories are not just from everywhere in the country but all over the world.
My own uncles have been squeezed like lemons about the last war.
One drily recalls being sent across a field by his commanding officer in Normandy the day after D-Day to establish whether it was mined. "Drunk, as usual," he said.
The historian Andrew Roberts says he had a lovely time researching his first book, The Holy Fox, a biography of Lord Halifax. It involved talking to fascinating elderly gentlemen in London clubs.
Clever Andrew, he got to them just in time: many would be dead now. And that generation lived, in its turn, in the shadow of its own parents and grandparents.
In a delightful letter in last week's Spectator, a lady whose husband was born in 1915 said that he remembered meeting an elderly relative aged 104 when he was three, whose father drove a stagecoach in the 18th century. That's genealogy for you.
The beauty of everyone living longer is that we can, nowadays, go back a couple of generations more easily than ever.
Henry Allingham, who died last week, was a living link with the First World War. But all around London there are old people with stories to tell.
One messenger at the Evening Standard, Jack, who retired recently, ran away as a young London boy to join bomber command at the age of 16 - he lied to recruiting officers about his age.
He ended up surviving most of his comrades, being shot down several times and bombing Switzerland by accident - the description of the target fitted a village inside the Swiss border.
Formal oral military history projects, such as the one at Warwick University, record memories such as these but I got them gratis.
My family are good value. My father got handed over a shop counter in a basket when he was a day old - he was born to a Protestant girl in an Irish village at a time when illegitimacy was a no-no.
The shop girl passed him on to her sister, my grandmother. His adoptive father was an engine stoker and was courted by the Bolsheviks of Vladivostock as a potential Irish recruit when his ship arrived there, and joined the (Old) IRA on his return home.
So Mr Parkinson should hold his head high. His granny and her granny were surely fascinating, whatever BBC progamme makers think.
It just takes a bit of imagination to see the interest of ordinary people.
Reader views (2)
Susan is right when she says that the programme makers need drama but to me, and many thousands like me, my family is not boring, even though the BBC would not even glance at them. My agricultural labourers, parlour-maids, coal-miners, etc.,who just got on with their lives were a part of who I am and I am proud of them. Melanie said in her article about "..pupils...asking how their (elderly people) mothers did their washing". I never considered my own life as particulary interesting but my childhood (1939-)was very different to modern times and, when I am gone, my own children/grandchildren will have no idea of what life had been like for my family just 70 years ago and would be appalled at the conditions in which we lived. Perhaps I should write it down. Hold your head up, Mr. Parkinson, your family is something to be proud of for you and that is all that matters.
- Marjorie, Lincolnshire - England, 23/07/2009 11:12
Report abuse
Nobody in their right minds would say that old people are boring and shouldn't be listened to. But if you are a television maker and you have limited slots to fill, you research all the stories available, and pick the ones with the most drama - Who do You Think You Are? is after all an entertainment programme on television. That's how it works.
- Susan, London, 22/07/2009 17:06
Report abuse
