So who do YOU think you are?

I love TV programmes that help people trace their ancestry. I actually prefer the US version of Who Do You Think You Are? because the backgrounds of the celebrities taking part are much more varied than they are here in the boring old UK. Everyone in the USA wants to be able to trace their ancestry back to the Native Americans. I think it's about belonging. It's not possible, of course. There aren't enough Native Americans to go round. Europe - Ireland, Scotland, Italy, Germany, western Russia, the Czech republic, Poland, etc - all sent enough people to the USA to start a new nation but they're nowhere near as exciting as the poor exploited 'Indians'.

In the UK, it seems 'celebrities' trying to trace their ancestors want to be noble. Never mind that your great-grandad was a poor soul, barely educated, unskilled and riddled with syphilis, who spent a lot of his life in the workhouse. If your 12 times great-grandad was an aristocrat - or, as a friend of mine used to say: slept with an aristocrat - you can hold your head up.

I like the ads for quizzes on Facebook that ask who you were in a previous life, more specifically; Which queen were you in a previous life? It's nonsense, of course - 'clickbait.' Those of us old enough can remember relatives who in 'a previous life' weren't queens or ladies but skivvies who got up at 4am to clean out the fireplaces and light the fires for the real ladies in posh houses. I remember my father telling me he was taken on to deliver butcher meat to posh houses in Pollokshields in the mornings before he went to school. This would be in the 1930s. He got a row on his first day because he made the mistake of going to the front door and was directed by a servant round the back. One of the things that most annoyed me when I volunteered at the Museum of Rural Life in East Kilbride was to find that the saddest room in Kittochside farmhouse, the maid's room - a tiny space with no character - wasn't even mentioned in the tour.

As for Danny Dyer, who was the subject of tonight's programme, is he for real? He's almost a caricature Cockney. He's only about 40 but his rhyming slang seems to hark back to the Victorian era. It's so convoluted I couldn't follow it. Turns out he's a descendant of Thomas Cromwell and Edward III. He certainly had the swagger to go with the ancestry. He also had a large family from the 1860s onwards who spent a lot of time in and out of the workhouse, not to mention an ancestor who was charged with concealing the death of a baby. She gave birth in secret aged 17 and, not knowing what to do, didn't tie off the umbilical cord. My sympathy was with her rather than the aristocrats but I'm sure you knew that already.