Find My Past - New television series

[Sandgrounder1]

I think it would have been better to have three random people who then find themselves connected to one person in the past and that one person would have a very interesting story.  The way it was put over, there was nothing to keep the viewers tuned in.  Everything was too vague.

[millymcb]

Just settling down to watch this now....I'll be back!

Milly

[BumbleB]

I liked the content, and it was very interesting - however, my pet hate spoiled it yet again, sorry    The programme should have lasted 30 minutes, but with "b....y" adverts every 10 minutes, each lasting 5 minutes, it was padded out to 60 - I now know why I fall asleep so often    And as a result of the long intervals of course they had to recap - grrrrrrrrrrrrrh 

BumbleB

[Fue]

I didn't think it was overly padded, and they didn't do that dreadfully irritating thing of going over and over the same bit just in case you were too thick to grasp it the first time.

Err, sorry, but are you sure you were watching the same programme, or did you pop out to make a cup of tea (or some family research, which would have been far more worthwhile) every time they went over things again and again? 

mshrmh has the right idea, recording programmes so you do not have to watch endless, endless adverts but for some reason I just get suckered into wanting to watch it live - whatever that means.

[flipflops]

I always record commercial programmes and quite a few of the others too - I can often knock 15 - 20 wasted minutes off a one hour programme.

[millymcb]

On the whole I quite enjoyed it - although it was little simplistic and didn't tell me anything I didn't already know.

I thought the best part of it was talking with the veterans about their own experiences.  It made a nice change from just having a presenter or historian telling us the same old thing...  And I really liked the sound recording of the grandfather with shots of Dunkirk to illustrate his story.  


I didn't like the bit at the end where the presenter interviewed them and asked them to tell each other what they had learnt though.  Felt a bit like being in a classroom and feeding back to the class...  

Not sure why they bothered with the family tree bit at the beginning.  It was like they were supposed to be making a programme using Findmypast - but then changed it half-way through to become something else. They could just have introduced the people and told us they were retracing their grand-father's footsteps and that would have been fine. Tracing via parent's marriage on a computer with a genealogist was a bit irrelevant.

But all in all - considering they probably only had a fraction of the time and money WDYTYA have - I thought they did OK.... I'll give it 6 out of 10.


Milly

[millymcb]

Me too - I nearly always watch programmes I have recorded these days to miss the adverts and recaps.

I wonder what next week's story is?   I predict Jamaican immigrants arriving on Windrush for one of the programmes. Plus there will be a first world war story.  But hopefully they will have been imaginative enough to come up with some subjects which are not often covered.

Milly

[flipflops]

I think it might have something to do with a spitfire.

FindMyPast is building an online collection of photos of ancestors who were connected in any way to Dunkirk, Battle of Britain and D-Day

[kerryb]

WDYTYA is made by Wall to Wall productions NOT the BBC. The BBC buys the rights to air the English version. Wall to Wall also makes the Irish one which RTE airs.  I believe Wall to Wall also makes other WW versions of WDYTYA.

Besides, Chris Hollins is a BBC man through and through, perhaps the production company were hoping the Beeb are/were going to air it too depending on its success.

BTW, I don't dislike Chris, its just this kind of program requires a different deaper style of presenting.

sorry my mistake!