Gemma Collins - Why Do You Think You Are?

[LuluBlakey1]

I watched this expecting to turn it off after 10 minutes as I am usually so irritated by her.
Actually watched the whole thing and found her quite likeable at times. She was irritating but in an oddly endearing, genuine, way. She was gloriously awful but at the same time has a bit of nous about her, didn't mind being make-up free on camera for most of the programme, was incredibly badly dressed, could talk to anyone at all and get on with them. She was totally unsnobbish and it was an interesting, sad, story of women being judged and treated badly by men and society and tough lives.
Anyone else watch it?
Along with Olly Murs last week, it is the best of the last series which have been increasingly dull.

no i also read Cliff Richard had indian heritage, anglo-indian @ChungKing

He said he had Spanish ancestry on an interview once.

I haven't watched it for ages (must go on player!) But I loved Jeremy Paxman's episode. He was very moved by the extreme poverty (his GG I think) and how the women just kept on in the face of hardship.

just got round to watching this.

fascinating.
and coincidentally had just seen Lucy Worsley's programme about Jack the Ripper and so knew all about Charles Booth's map of Whitechapel,
i wonder if it was all related to gin drinking?

thanks to this thread i also watched Josh Widdicombe ,
fabulous

Cliff Richards is well aware of his mother's ancestry but does not discuss it as "back then" for his family it was a source of shame.
Whereas for most of us nowadays it would be a source of pride, something a bit different, like people who bang on about being an eighth Irish

I find Who Do You endlessly fascinating. I thought it was just my family that didn't know about more than a couple of generations back but no, that seems very common. It amazes me how much family history just vanishes. Clare Baldings WDY was fascinating, a few generations away from her antecedent the Baking Powder King of New York - sorry, name escapes me - who made a fortune from his product. She had never heard of him.

Boris Johnson searching for the story behind grannie’s silver. The Defeffer silver he called it, turned out he is of Russian descent and the silver came from royalty

Adel Ray had a interesting his grandmother or great grandma was from Kenya I think he went to her village

Jerry springers was very moving

I’m tempted to say that Family History doesn’t vanish, that it is there hidden behind the curtain of time and (in a slightly different sense) lack of time in busy lives (Yes, family history research is a great retirement activity). That curtain is now thinner than ever, with TV programmes like WDYTYA and Heir Hunters providing motivation and modest guidance and websites like Ancestry, Family Search, Scotland’s People and several others making it interesting, providing some challenge and facilitating the sharing of information and stories of family events. I do miss going to Records Offices and similar to find the detail, I don’t miss ploughing through 2,000 families on microfilm to find the census return for the one family that interests me!
But the temptation was inappropriate. Much to my father’s annoyance, and now my frustration, when she became a widow, my paternal grandmother burnt a lot of family photographs and some family papers simply due to the misguided belief that they were of little interest and importance to others. All that family history of their early marriage and of her and her husband’s parents and siblings has indeed vanished. Save what you can, explain what is there with a post-it note. Your children maybe disinterested, their children may currently be tearaways, but come the time they retire, they will start getting interested, so invest now in that future interest.

Think she just feels the need to constantly perform but when she being just her normal run of the mill self love her

The outstanding one for me, was EastEnders’ Dot Cotton (June Brown?) . They traced her ancestry right back to Spanish Jews who’d had to flee the Inquisition hundreds of years ago, and some ended up in London via France. IIRC there were still records of those ancestors in a Spanish synagogue. I think there was an 18thC prizefighter among them.

Astonishing.

Re those being told their stories weren’t interesting enough - I recently read Alison Steadman’s autobiography and she was told the same. However when she later did the itv dna equivalent they mentioned her fathers’s adoption, she said they were mistaken but it was true, her father was dead and had never mentioned it and it seems likely he wasn’t aware. Her older sister was very upset about it being made public.

Haven’t read all the thread but I will give this a watch if it is still on iPlayer. I didn’t particularly like her persona on TOWIE but I watched a programme about her once and I had so much empathy for her. She had suffered a miscarriage at a young age and I think she comfort ate after that . She is a beautiful lady , stunning eyes I think but people don’t seem to see past her weight.

Cliff Richard is fully aware of his Indian heritage!

Alistair McGowan

Yes he turned up to an Indian village full of McGowans didnt he?