wdytya

[Finley 1]

Have I missed John Simpson .....
cant remember if he has been on and I missed him?


xin

[jan57]

 John Simpson   hasn't  been shown  yet ,   last  night  was Sarah Millican

[Finley 1]

Oh   thats great, dont want to miss it.

thanks


xin

I enjoyed Sarah Millicans  - which I was not too sure I would.  The story was good, not the fact she had her two seperate trees given to her without any hard work on her part!  never mind green monster is being put away.xin

[elinga]

yes they make it look so easy , very deceiving to someone just starting out ;-(

[Winterbloom21]

I've enjoyed most of this series, but I particularly liked last night's one.      I like the way that the style of the show seems to have changed to concentrating on finding one or two interesting people and then going with them, and finding out as much as possible, rather than just plodding through a chain of people.

I was particularly jealous of the amount of records and references that they managed to dig out for Sarah Millican's ancestors, and must admit to welling up with her when she read the bit about her diver ancestor and the orphaned children.    And as for her poor Scottish ggggrandfather who had to have his feet chopped off!    Aargh!    But they did kind of gloss over the fact that she already knew that he had had a happy ending, because she had seen the tree before she went, so knew that he had descendants.  (Though maybe they didn't show her the dates, so she wouldn't have been sure if he married before or after his Canadian adventure).

[weste]

It's Marianne Faithful next week so john simpson must be the week after cos last night was 8/10.

[Annui]

We're in the USA and watching the US version of this show.  Each episode has been interesting, in different ways.

What puzzles me is how on earth the producers manage to find the right personalities to feature. A show filled with ag.labs and the odd tradesman wouldn't attract much of an audience.  The characters featured all have a particularly fascinating  story and ancestor somewhere in their history.  I wonder whether, maybe, 1000 or more celebs were asked for permission for a team to sift though their back history and the best half dozen or so stories identified that way?  Seems like a lot of work  though.   

[bearsome]

Somewhere on this site, there's some posts by someone who actually worked on reaearch for WDYTYA. They confirmed that a number of 'celebs' are contacted about research into the family history but, if nothing of any great interest is found, then the whole thing is dropped. An example was Michael Parkinson, whose family never moved out of Yorkshire.  And, yes, the amount spent in doing the research is quite scary!

[Davsuro]

I suppose it depends on who decides the subject (for example Michael Parkinson) is of no interest. With the new style WDYTYA they may have included historic events from Yorkshire.

The new format of WDYTYA appears to repeat the facts/discoveries which wastes time! the editing is  confusing -  Sarah Millicans being a prime example. The divers wife was from Lowestoft, and ? some of their children born in Yarmouth (only caught a quick glance of the information on the family tree) would have liked a bit more information on his family, but it was not to be.