Who do you think you are turns 20: How BBC hit revealed Danny Dyer's royal lineage and Judi Dench's father's heroics and encouraged millions of Brits to research their own family trees By Christopher Stevens Published: 23:14, 11 August 2024 | Updated: 23:26, 11 August 2024 e-mail View comments Make a note of the date. BBC1's family history show Who Do You Think You Are ? returns on Thursday, and for actress Vicky McClure, making accurate notes of dates turns out to be quite important. In the opening episode of the new series, the Line Of Duty star is learning about her great-grandad Thomas.
He was a sailor who went to Canada almost a century ago, before Vicky's much-loved 'Nonna' was born. In one of the painstaking scenes of archive detective work that make this show such a popular format, Vicky pores over shipping charts with an expert. She deduces that the old boy set sail in January 1925, came home to his wife Ruby the following July.
.. and Nonna was born in December.
When the full ramifications finally hit her, Vicky's jaw drops. 'He can't be the father of my Nonna!' she gasps. Danny Dyer traced his ancestry around East London, in Newham and Poplar where many of his forebears worked on the docks Danny Dyer discovered that his line of descent winds back to the 16th century, and Henry VIII's brutish adviser Thomas Cromwell It's a moment that encapsulates the appeal of this show, which first aired 20 years ago and regularly draws audiences of five million.
The emotional surg.