Who do you think you are - Patsy Kensit BBC1, 8pm Rory and Paddy's great British adventure Five, 9pm What a rollercoaster of a ride it was with Patsy Kensit as she researched her family tree. And what a winner this excellent programme from the BBC is. It's such a simple format, but it's fraught with risk - who knows what the celebrities involved will find when they dig into their past.
No-one was more shocked than Patsy to find that her great-great-great-great-grandfather, James Mayne, was a respected vicar, a pillar of the community and a charity fundraiser who counted Prince Albert among his patrons.
A far cry indeed from her petty criminal grandfather James, and her gangland villain father James, who was famously friends with the Krays and worked for Charlie Richardson, another of London's most notorious criminals of the 1960s. Patsy was so shocked, or maybe relieved, that she spent much of the show crying as she found out that three generations back and more her family were not criminals, but ordinary working folks and men of the cloth.
It was an emotional journey with an emotional woman whom you couldn't help but warm to throughout the programme, and it made me want to discover what's hidden in my own family tree.
Paddy McGuinness and Rory McGrath embarked upon a journey of a very different kind than that of Patsy. It will last four weeks, but I can't say I'll join them for the ride after last night's first leg. It was more than enough. Not that it was Paddy's fault. I have nothing much against him. Rory, on the other hand don't get me started. Rory McGrath must be one of the unfunniest funny men around, and a right smug git to boot. And although it may not be his fault, is there really nothing he can do about that nasal whine of his? Why oh why did he not have his adenoids removed as a child?
Yes, I can't stand the man. I tried to ignore him as much as I could, as the pair of them took to the road in a wonderful VW split-screen camper van, which was, if truth were told, the real star of the show. The problem with Paddy and Rory's adventure, other than the fact it had Rory in it, was that it just wasn't that good an adventure. The title was obviously "inspired" by Max and Paddy's Road to Nowhere, the spin-off from Phoenix Nights, with Peter Kay, which was actually funny. Rory McGrath, take note.
So, in this adventure, every week Rory and Paddy promised us, they would try out some of the more crazy sports that we British apparently just love to take part in. Unsurprisingly, they were in the Gloucestershire and Cotswolds area for their first sport of cheese rolling, and this probably gave them the comedy moment of the whole series, but they missed it.
When the cheese-rolling champion, who was clearly also the village idiot, crept up behind them as they did a link to camera, to tell them that he was OK, after being knocked unconscious during the "race", it was like something out of The League of Gentlemen. This is Gloucester, remember. When I spent a few nights down that way one summer, the guys in the bar went outside to toss breeze blocks to while away the hours. They're not sane in that part of the world. Trust me, I've seen it with my own eyes.
Unfortunately, both of them got out unharmed, and headed across country to East Anglia. Once there, the guys played some crazy pub game involving a beer-soaked cloth and a stick called a drivel. Never has something been more aptly named. Drivel this whole show most definitely was.
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