Apologies, folks, but I'm back on one of my favourite moans again! Last Saturday's issue of the Daily Mail's Weekend magazine - the TV listings mag - blurbed right across the bottom of the front cover the headline "THE ASTONISHING SECRET IN NIGEL HAVERS' PAST". I turned to pages 4-5 and 6 to find that the feature was blurbing the new series of Who Do You Think You Are? beginning on Wednesday July 24. The main headline read: "The Skeletons In Their Closets". Naturally, as a genealogist and a fan of WDYTYA? (I even appeared in one episode) I read avidly to discover what terrible secret the researchers had discovered in the past of the actor Nigel Havers. An ancestor hanged for highway robbery or sheep-stealing perhaps? A female ancestor who was a brothel keeper? An ancestor transported to Australia and Botany Bay? Sadly, none of these! The "astonishing secret" was that Havers - described as "always the poshest of our thespian types" - actually had a great-great-great-grandfather who was - wait for it - a cabbie in Victorian Essex! "Everyone talks about how posh I am," prattled Havers, "to the point that everyone must be bored hearing it. Well, as it turns out, I'm no posher than anybody else - which is fantastic!" Woweeeee! I can hardly wait to see it. Much as I enjoy WDYTYA?, I never cease to be amazed by the reactions of the luvvies whose ancestries are traced. Having myself taken part in a number of TV documentaries, I am well aware of how the producers try to get their subjects to jump through hoops to produce an emotive reaction. A recent series about celebrities who had an ancestor in the workhouse (which we have discussed previously) produced an extraordinary range of emotions from tears to one Scottish actor who got very angry and raged about the system. Can these luvvies really be so naive as not to realise that the world was a very different place 100 and more years ago and that trying to judge things that happened long, long ago by a mindset of modern values is simply plain stupid? -- Roy Stockdill Genealogical researcher, writer & lecturer Famous family trees blog: http://blog.findmypast.co.uk/tag/roy-stockdill/ "There is only one thing in the world worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about." OSCAR WILDE