Broadcast Awards at 20: Who Do You Think You Are?

I’d worked on some ideas for genealogy shows with Alex Graham when I was at Wall to Wall, then had a couple of disastrous goes at BBC2.

Done wrong, it can be like looking at other people’s holiday photos, but I thought that if we could connect it with people the audience already knew and loved, it could work. The Great Britons series pointed to a way to do it.

We’d just agreed to reboot Top Gear with Jeremy Clarkson, and Jeremy Paxman had signed a big deal for Newsnight, so they both ‘took one for the team’. That opened the door to other names, such as Sheila Hancock (pictured).

It was tough at first to work out how to connect it all up. Researchers pored over church and workhouse records for six months, but we still wanted celebrities to be seen to find things out for themselves – without it looking artificial.

It led a pack of 9pm shows – including Coast and The Apprentice - that were deliberately entertaining ways of engaging with serious subjects. BBC2 had been missing some ‘clever pleasure’ - and this had it in spades.