Vicky McClure: ‘Everybody’s lives are important. No matter where you come from’
For 20 years, Who Do You Think You Are? has told surprising and inspiring stories of migration, struggle, survival and hope. As the genealogy series returns, actor Vicky McClure says this has changed the way we look at ourselves and our country
There is a moment in the first episode of a new run of Who Do You Think You Are? where everyone watching will fall in love with Vicky McClure’s grandmother, known with great affection as Nonna Jean. Actor McClure is the popular star of Line of Dutyand This Is England and had been keen to appear on Who Do You Think You Are? – mainly to investigate her Nonna Jean’s past. Why was her grandmother put up for adoption at birth, unlike her older siblings? What she uncovers is a story involving real struggle, but with a happy ending.
“The way she handled the pain and the trauma just makes me love her even more,” McClure tells Big Issue, down the line from her home in Nottingham, ahead of the episode going out on BBC One.
These are the kind of stories that have made Who Do You Think You Are? one of the most compelling shows on television – ever since Bill Oddie became the first celebrity to have his roots done in 2004. The film may focus on the families of famous people, but what the genealogists and historians uncover are depictions of everyday heroism, stoicism and struggle.
Over the years, the series has slowly and subtly constructed a new picture of the country. Global stories of migration and war intermingle with accounts of ancestors surviving poverty to create something better. These powerful accounts build a portrait of a country shaped by immigration over many centuries.
Executive producer Colette Flight, who has worked on the series since 2006, says: “All these personal stories together make up our shared history. They tell the story of our nation.”
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McClure knew that Nonna Jean’s childhood was not happy. Jean had run away from her abusive adoptive parents after being treated terribly. Yet, as McClure explains, Jean continued to face the world with love, building a safe, warm, loving family of her own into which McClure was born in 1983.
“She had told us a bit over the years. Not an awful lot,” says McClure. “It’s not a very nice thing to talk about. But she was really badly treated.
“Nonna Jean died a couple of years ago and I never saw her angry in my entire life. I never saw her sad. I never saw her cry. And I never saw her cross,” says McClure. “You couldn’t have asked for somebody more loving and caring and positive and upbeat. It was very much her stance, to make sure that what happened to her didn’t bleed into her own family and into her own life.”
Instead, Nonna Jean was married for 73 years – and her attitude, that her children would never suffer as she did – is especially admirable when more details of her past are revealed.
“Honestly, I miss her terribly. When someone passes you reflect a lot more,” says McClure. “There is a lot to be angry about in the world – past and present. But Nonna was a very, very loving woman. She gave out a lot of love. So she deserved a lot of love back. And from the minute she met my grandad, she lived a happy life. That was her happy ending. She lived into her 90s, died in her home with her loved ones around her. Nobody deserved that more.”
Who Do You Think You Are? has been running for 20 years, across more than 150 episodes. As well as being a ratings smash – moving from BBC Two to BBC One, just as the McClure-starring Line of Duty did years later – it has sparked a boom in genealogy as more and more of us seek to find out the secrets of how we came to exist. By 2011, when census data from a century earlier was released, it received an incredible 22 million page views in its first two days.
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Genealogist Sara Khan has worked on Who Do You Think You Are? since its fourth series. She has been closely involved in some of its finest moments.
“The impact of this show is massive,” she says. “And it has coincided with the growth of the internet making genealogical research so much easier. We have birth and death records available from 1837 and census returns for every 10 years from 1841 to 1921. They give a really good snapshot of what people’s circumstances are, who their parents are, what their occupations are.
“People can do it at home now, whereas I remember spending half a day flicking through massive ledgers trying to find an index of a birth.”
Her advice for anyone looking into their family history is to ask questions.
“Speak to all your family members, especially the older ones,” says Khan. “Start interviewing them and always write things down. Go through old boxes of papers and letters and photos, get as much information as possible, then log into one of the websites. Start finding your parents or grandparents’ records, birth, marriage and death certificates and start digging.”
Khan recalls finding one of Danny Dyer’s ancestors listed in Burke’s Peerage – a publication listing landed gentry and noble families – before digging further to discover he was a direct descendent of King Edward III. “A real Eureka moment!” She also discovered one of Michelle Keegan’s ancestors was listed as a suffragist on the 1911 census.
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Then there was Dame Judi Dench. “Her family tree goes back from Ireland to Denmark, which is quite exciting in itself. But to be able to place one of her ancestors in the court where Hamlet was set by Shakespeare? You couldn’t make that up, could you? She loved that.”
Khan also found that one of Billy Connolly’s four-times great grandparents, who was working in India as a British soldier, was married to an Indian woman, “so he had had a 100% Indian ancestor. He loved that too.”
Flight recalls another trip to India when asked for a highlight from across the years, citing Anita Rani’s episode in 2017, which confronted the brutal impact that the Partition of India had on her family.
“It had an extraordinary reaction from of people whose family had the same history but they hadn’t talked about it,” she says. “Anita’s episode opened up those conversations.”
McClure (second from right) next to her other Nonna, Iris, with her sister Jenny and grandfather on the left. Image: Carol McClure
After the big discoveries comes the hard work of verifying everything. For McClure’s show, this included using DNA records to trace the identity of her Nonna Jean’s real father as McClure’s family history tour took her away from Nottingham.
“It was really strange – we ended up at the docks in Grimsby and I was like, I know this place. It’s exactly where we filmed This Is England.”
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There was also a mystery surrounding the death of McClure’s maternal great-grandfather during the Second World War. McClure travels 6,000 miles to Taiwan, where she learns about the fate of Iris’s dad, Harry.
“My Nonna Iris was always a hard woman. If you’ve seen the Our Dementia Choir documentaries, we spoke about it then,” she says. “It really struck me how hard it would have been for Iris that her dad was killed in a Japanese war camp, never to see him again. This could be a big reason why she was quite an unhappy woman at times.”
McClure discover an all-too common story: of young, working-class men shipped off to war never to return – their lives seen as somehow more expendable.
“Has that changed? Nope. I don’t think so,” says McClure. “But that’s the point. Everybody’s lives are important. No matter where you come from.”
It’s a theme that Who Do You Think You Are? returns to again and again.
“I knew in my heart that I’m from a very working-class family,” McClure concludes. “Doing Who Do You Think You Are? made me feel so lucky. And super proud to be from good, hardy people that worked hard and looked after each other.
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“And it made sense of things – this real need to work hard, be part of a community, and look after other people. All that stuff is instilled in me and my family. You find your people, don’t you, in life? The people around me have a very similar outlook, and that comes down through the generations.
“The biggest thing I took from this was how goddam proud of my family I am.”
Who Do You Think You Are? is on BBC One from Thursday 15 August
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