After 20 years rooting around the family trees of celebrities, Who Do You Think You Are? (BBC One) served up something new: a guest who has actually had a hit with a song of the same name. “Swing it, shake it, move it, make it/Who do you think you are?” go the bump-and-grind lyrics.
The show’s first ever Spice Girl wasn’t Ginger or Baby or Scary, and certainly not Posh. In the personable Melanie Chisholm, aka Mel C or Sporty Spice, it alighted on someone who has certain ideas about who she is – “determined, driven, independent,” in her words – and hoped to unearth similar DNA among her forebears.
For the search through various libraries and archives, she donned a classy array of trademark tracky Bs. What Chisholm found was people who, despite coming from poverty, turned out to be canny accumulators of money. Mary Bilsborough, a fearsome great-grandmother on her father’s side, had three children outside her marriage, then became a moneylender. “If you don’t have a lot of money,” wondered Chisholm, not unreasonably, “how do you lend it to people?”
A historian explained that Liverpool once had many such women, who were required to prove their good character in court. Mel C was ready with her rubber stamp. “Girl power!” she said approvingly. Chisholm’s status as a wannabe Scouser, having grown up outside the city’s perimeter, was also explored before she found herself following a Patrick Flaherty back to 1840s Limerick.
Then she switched to her mother’s side and found a great-great-great-great-grandfather who hailed, to her bafflement, from Devon.
After a hardscrabble in the insurance industry, Thomas Keef adopted an Irish identity, calling himself O’Keef, in which name Chisholm found him addressing a crowd about temperance outside St George’s Hall in Liverpool, opposite the Empire where she performed with the Spices. She was chuffed to know that he also campaigned to widen suffrage to include working-class men. “I love this guy!” she said. She didn’t quite say “guy power!”
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