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The Genealogy Guy chats with the perceptive Nicholas David Barrett, genealogist and consultant for BBC's "Who Do You Think You Are?", and discusses the show's origins and how it combines social history and genealogy. He gives his views on why he thinks this show has been so successful and had worldwide recognition as a TV format.
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Mell 0:17
And now I'm joined by Nicholas David Barratt, a genealogist who is also best known as the genealogical consultant for series one to four of the BBC show. Who do you think you are? And well, welcome on to the studios.
Nick Barratt 0:32
Thank you very much. It's a pleasure to be here. Thanks for having me.
Mell 0:35
It sounds weird, saying studios when it's all remote, but there you go. So,
Nick Barratt 0:39
I know what you mean. It's that feel of being in a studio, even if technology means we are in separate places. I can imagine in my mind's eye that studio feel so it's nice to think of it in those terms.
Mell 0:49
So you're involved in the first four seasons of "Who do you think you are"? How did the show come about?
Nick Barratt 0:55
Oh! That's a great question. There are lots of different origin stories about it. My version is that I was working for the BBC. And it was a development opportunity. So they'd started working in house on a concept that looked at elements of social history and genealogy. We did a pilot, it was more of a research exercise than a filmed pilot, on a celebrity, who I don't think has actually been featured on the show, and may not even know this, but better not reveal it. But it's no one that anyone has seen. Let's put it that way. And from that, we just kicked around a few ideas about how we might bring elements of family stories to a wider public. And out of that grew, the idea of something that looked at social history, through family. At the same time WallTto Wall, the production company that made the program had pitched a similar idea around using celebrities in a way that Tony Robinson for time team gave you an accessible face to ask questions of experts without being an expert themselves. So the two ideas sort of came together at the right time. And out of that, "Who do you think you are" was born although in fairness, it was never intended to be called, Who do you think you are? It was gonna be something like, you know, families and time or blood trails or something. I can't remember the name of it now. But it was only when we started working with our celebrities, and realised that once we wanted to tell a fairly linear chronological social history, where they saw their ancestors as living examples of one thing per week, the actual magic was when our celebrities started to really think about what it meant to them. The best example of that, I guess, is Bill Oddie. And actually, having worked with him, he coined the phrase, who do you think you are? His story was all about the Industrial Revolution, particularly the cotton factory that were emerging in the Northwest in the early 19th century, and his family were born in Yorkshire and crept over the border into Lancashire, probably in the dead of night, actually, and got involved with the emerging middle towns, Darwen, Blackburn. And so their story was the Industrial Revolution. But Bill wasn't that interested in that he wanted to find out about what happened to his mum. And so we uncovered this really personal story, where Bill was shocked to discover he had an older sister, who had died five days after she had been born. So he never knew about her. And he always thought he was the eldest in the family. And it just kind of got him thinking, Well, I don't know who I am. Who do I think I am? I don't know, because this story was hidden from me.
Mell 3:25
So I understand that the format of the show the original format, gradually changed due to the pilot.
Nick Barratt 3:31
Yes, I mean, all TV shows have to fit the commission brief. So the first series was still a series of 10 films. Each one had a particular theme of social history. So poverty, industrial revolution, coal mining, migration, whatever it was, and our celebrities still pretty much followed that storyline. However, having worked with our first tenant, particularly people like Bill, we realised that the real magic was in following what interested them and the emotional story rather than the historical story. So at the time, we got to series two, and obviously having great ratings helps a second series get launched, we were able to just tweak the brief a little bit. And it became much more about the celebrity and what they were looking at, rather than this week, we're going to talk about railways. And that I think, is why the series has gone from strength to strength. Normally, you might get three or four, four or five, but it's just gone from strength to strength, because we don't have that prescribed format. Every individual is unique. You're watching them, but you're also on watching a slice of history that you've never have known about. It's a real worm's eye view of the past, rather than the traditional, very academic led narrative of Kings queens, generals, aristocratic politicians top down. So that's, I think, also part of the magic of the show.
Mell 4:43
During the former one of the things that always amazed to find out about it was for the celebrity. It is totally unscripted.
Nick Barratt 4:49
Absolutely. And that is one of the Golden principles behind the show. And I think what makes it work, we work with a lot of actors and they sometimes struggle the most with some scripted format, it is at the moment am I meant to emotional, I meant to be sad, you know, and they gradually ease into it, you can see them stop being a version of themselves, and they become themselves. So we have never done that with one exception. And that was the first pilot week that we actually worked on. Post commission. This was Jeremy Clarkson. And in his case, he was going to be the star name for series one. Now, unfortunately, he wasn't completely enamored with the thought of this genealogy meets social history fusion that we'd come up with. So we thought we'd actually film him discovering his family tree, appealing to his sense of detail and breadth and depth, we thought it just got a kick out of seeing it all set out. And it quickly became apparent that this wasn't going to work. We'd added names and a little biographical notes about each person then he was looking at the Clarksons, and he says they had nothing but genetic landfill, which was not a great start, or a great way to talk about your ancestors. And so it went branch after branch so we found right at the far end of the family tree on the maternal line, a name that jumped out at him. Now we were filming in his kitchen, and the name had clearly hit something in his memory and he was looking around and there it was, he spotted the name on a shelf above him. It was Kilner, of course the Kilner Jar empire. So he was suddenly interested in doing the show, thinking he was a direct descendant, and therefore an heir to a family fortune. Now luckily, we were able to prove that he was from that branch of the Kilner family. Unfortunately for him, the family had frittered away the money in the third generation. So that's the only time we've shown anyone anything in advance. The magic of the show lies in the fact that celebrities bring their prior knowledge to the process. But they have no idea what they're going to find until we reveal it to them live, as we record that has preserved the integrity of the show. And I think that's why people approach it with both a sense of excitement and just a little bit of trepidation. Because they don't really know what they're going to find. And I should add that that also extends to the edit suite as well, which is where most of the magic of the show happens. You know, normally you film 1012 days, 14 days, 8 to 10 hours a day, 100 hours minimum. And you have to boil that down to one hour of footage. So of course, a lot of that is cut in the edit suite. And normally a presenter of a program will not only script it, and rehearse the lines and then deliver it to camera, but they will go into the edit suite, select the right bits with the editor and director put a voiceover so you know what's going to happen next. All of that disappears on Who do you think you are? We have a voiceover artist. And that editorial purity is kept by the team. So the celebrity is always arm's length at that part of the process.
Mell 7:37
How did you go around selecting who was going to be offered the opportunity? Because you couldn't just go to anybody and go, do you want to be on the show?
Nick Barratt 7:44
Well, that's pretty much what we did, actually, because it was never done before we it was completely untried and untested. And of course, let's not forget, back in 2002, when I first started working on the format, and 2003 when they studies and commissioning got started, there was very little material online, the 1901 census briefly, and then it crashed again, some material on what is now Family Search. And of course, there wasn't that much junk on the internet. So you couldn't really just do a background search on your celeb and see all of their details like you've got today. So we had to really drop. We called it a shortlist. But there were 150 names, I'll say that again. 150 that we thought might make suitable candidates. Now don't forget, we only thought this might have one series. So in that sense, it didn't really matter, you had a broader chance. But you're right, it's very difficult to spot someone's background until you've done the research. But of course, you can't research all of them. So we were trying to target them from what they knew about their background, we'd do interviews, checking what they thought they knew, would see if they have any family members that we could talk to. And if it looked promising, and it fits one of our 10 categories would then stand up some of the documentary research, which myself and my team were looking after, mainly so that we could guide the family tree research into the social areas that we thought would work either for the one we thought was going to happen or has happened on a few occasions, we've moved them into a different swim lane. So some of you might have started out industrial revolution, suddenly flipped across into the railways, because they'd moved off one line to another excuse the pun. So there were all sorts of things there that we were having to juggle. But it was fiendishly complicated, because we'd never done this before. We were putting these artificial barriers in the way of our celebrities, you know, let's forget once you start talking to them and their family, and we want to preserve this authenticity and surprise, they then can't talk to their family about what we're doing. We're not giving them a script, we're not letting them near the edit suite. So unsurprisingly, most of that 150 didn't want to do the show. We were left with 20 to 30, who were vaguely curious, I think it's best to say I wouldn't say they were warmly enamored with the idea of thing their family secrets revealed on TV. But once we had worked with them. And once other people saw just how respectfully we treated very sensitive subjects, and how authentic we were and some of the ethical boundaries you put around, not ever doing anything that would potentially compromise a living person, all those sorts of things. Once it aired, people were phoning up literally saying, Can I be on next week? So, yeah, obviously, you can't. But that was the immediate reaction. It was a big hit, not just amongst the audience, but amongst people who wanted to go on this journey as well. We had a few people coming up to us, who thought they'd be ideal candidates. Because thinking of two folk here, well, I've researched my retreat back to 1520. So we've got plenty of information for you, not realizing Of course, there was nothing left to share. So those who were the most interested in had done some research unfortunately, ruled themselves out to the running quite quickly. One of those was someone who spent a bit of time with over the years, Miriam Margolyes, who would have, I think, just been the most outrageous and brilliant person ever, but she's done so much of her family, there's nothing else to say. So yeah, that would have been, that's one of the last episodes that was never made, it could have just been extraordinary. But anyway,
Mell 11:08
What makes the program really magical is the emotional part when people are finding things out. And I know that a lot of that can be done in the editor. But is there anybody that when it happened that may be one of your favorites, something that you discovered and you were able to watch? Watch how they took in the information so to speak.
Nick Barratt 11:27
It's a really interesting moment, because you never know what is actually going to trip a celebrity into that space. We didn't get a huge amount of emotion in series one, but in series two, I think most of them ended up weeping at a particular point in time. Even the most hardened nut will crack eventually, thinking here of Jeremy Paxman, and the reason I've chosen him is that he was another one who was convinced there was nothing to find. He knew it all already. He knew his identity. You know, I'm white middle class, I've got a successful career, it's all fine. There was a bit of an impasse between us and the team. And it probably would have stayed that way if it hadn't been for one of his Newsnight encounters with the then Secretary of State, John Reed. Now, Jeremy had gone after John, with reckless abandon using his standard interview technique of asking the same question again and again and again and again and again, until John had just snapped. He'd had enough and he just left the studio in a fit of well, not quite rage, but certainly disgust and as he tore up his mic, he mattered. Ah, yeah, nothing more than the attack dog of the BBC. You wouldn't have lasted more than five minutes, son, if you'd have been born in Glasgow. And with those words, he exited stage left. The next day, Jeremy's agent phoned us up and said, If you can find some Glaswegian roots, Jeremy will do the show. Now, extraordinarily, we'd found those Glaswegian connections, it was a very easy conversation to have. But what he didn't realise was that his story was one of abject poverty on all sides of the family. Actually, one went back into some of the mill towns that I've mentioned. Another went into Glasgow, his great grandmother, actually, she was an Army widow, and her husband had died, and therefore she was in receipt of a widow's pension to look after her and her nine children. Now, that's quite an ask at the best of times, but unfortunately, the neighbors pointed out accurately, if rather unkindly that at least two of the children were born several years after he had died. Therefore, how could they be his the army pension office investigated, the pension was stopped because she was making allegedly fraudulent claims. So she lost the house and she lost her income. And she ended up in one of the poorest tenements. in Glasgow at that time, late 19th century, I mean, property doesn't even do justice to what conditions she had to face on a daily basis two rooms now that's not two bedroom, but to physical small spaces to bring up her and her nine children, shared washrooms and amenities outside with, let's face it, some of the grim elements of local society at that time, she couldn't cope. She just couldn't cope. And so she had to make tough decisions about moving her children to different parts of the family or around the world. And you know, really, really tough. For me, I think there's something about an individual who assumes they know about themselves in the background, actually being confronted with the reality of their past. And also the reality of how other people live their lives. And Jeremy, well was upset on several occasions, but the most memorable was when we took him back to a similar Glasgow tenements. And he actually saw poverty, firsthand, close up that related to him in his story, and he mellowed, I mean, you might not see that on University Challenge on Newsnight. But actually talking to him afterwards and over a number of other series and programs that he did. He took a very different view and more caring view. A more empathetic view. And for me that empathy, which was linked to the emotion of being in the place where his ancestor stood and seeing what it was like that, again, is all part of the DNA of Who do you think you are, we are given glimpses into people's backgrounds, but we're also given a glimpse into how we might react. At the same time, if faced with similar challenges and situations.
Jingle 15:26
Email the podcast by contacting us info@armchairgenealogy.com. Just
Mell 15:31
Just before we continue with the second half of this edition of armchair genealogy with me the genealogy guy, I just wanted to ask you a huge favor and ask you to subscribe to the podcast, whatever platform you're listening on, it really informs us on developing the series. And as you just heard, feel free to drop the show in email. If you're listening on a computer or mobile device, bear in mind, if you have a smart speaker, you can say the wake word and just say the phrase play armchair genealogy podcast. Anyway, back to the second half. As we return to genealogical consultant Nick Barrett, and hear more about behind the camera and the making of the hugely successful worldwide TV series. Who do you think you are? It's now gone global, I mean, that the format of the show, although it's slightly changes the idea and the concept has now gone globally. So is it easier or harder or just completely different approach when it comes to research?
Nick Barratt 16:30
The research is challenging, it's much easier these days, because as we know, more data is being aggregated on platforms like Ancestry, Find My Past, My Heritage, The Genealogist, Family Search, you know, there are lots of shared datasets from around the world, my family, as it turns out, large part of it came from Europe and Germany, where it's really challenging to get records. But even now, many of those are appearing. I've worked, I've been very fortunate enough to have worked on the two series, the first two series in Ireland, setting it up and running the research, which did require some on site work, you couldn't do it back then online. And it's still challenging, as we know, to do Irish genealogy. So it was great setting the team and running the Irish programs out there, went out and set up the Australian version, again, quite challenging because of the federal system, you need connections in each of the federal archives. But as we know, there's a really interesting fusion of world history, running through Australia, not just firstly and European settlers, but a lot of the native Australian history that we looked at and into the Far East. So fascinating thing to do, I still work on and occasionally appear on the Australian series, even after all of these years. Again, it's I'm lucky enough to have worked on the US Series and have appeared on a couple of those including some great sequences where I had to explain British monarchy to a celebrity and they didn't quite get the concept of kings and queens, why would that it's not part of what they do, at least not for the last several 100 years. But the format's very different according to territory. The American one, for example, is punctuated with Ad breaks. And each one is almost a standalone eight to 10 minute episode with an adbreak and then another eight to 10 minute episodes, so it doesn't have the flow that we have over here. Australia is very similar to the British version, Ireland was a bit shorter and a bit more punchy and very focused on some of Ireland's more recent political history. So each one has its own pace and tone and tenor to suit the local audiences. And of course, the local history or other the national history of those local territories,
who was one of the hardest ones in the early days, when you first set this is there anyone that stands out you go this was this was so tough.
We had one story in the first couple of series that we couldn't actually film, mainly because it might have compromised an individual or individuals alive today. The Celebrity had revealed that they're, I think it was great uncle had died off the coast of Argentina in the 1920s. And they came from a very Republican part of Ireland. So we did a little bit of digging, and we had verified the fact that this had occurred. But what the celebrity didn't know was that their ancestor had been executed by their colleagues. They were part of an IRA training camp in South America, but the ancestor had been revealed as a British agent. Now revealing that information in a structured Republican part of Ireland would not have gone down well, so we didn't exactly spell it out. But we indicated there might be a problematic and troubling piece of information they might want to think about before we told them, they agreed with us that it wasn't something they could legitimately look at. We stepped away. Interestingly enough, that same celebrity has since done an episode of Who do you think you are? with a different focus? I think in the early days, some of the really troubling stuff was around verification, and corroboration of information in the sense that we're very used to the search algorithms on the commercial platforms that we see today. And you get a range of different things which allow you to then check or challenge what you're finding. There was one celebrity, there's actually Jim Moir (Vic Reeves), where one of his ancestors was a butler in a stately home. And every single piece of information indicated he married the lady of the house, which would have been the most extraordinary story upstairs, downstairs comes together somewhere in the middle. But it was so extraordinary. It just didn't sit comfortably with what I knew about the social history of the time. But every time I looked at it, it just led us to the same conclusion. Following the Sherlock Holmes approach, you know, we've been eradicated everything else what is left is likely to be true, I tried to rule out every single permutation or combination of other things it could be, and only on the last sweep through did I find someone from the same village born at the same day as the lady of the manor, living nearby, you know, same names of parents who actually had married the butler. Without that forensic double checking, and really detailed forensic research, we might have made a terrible blunder. And that just goes to show, you do need the historian as well as the archive researcher digging in, and also that check about, well, this is a great sensational story, let's run with it. Sometimes, you just need to rein it in and focus on what is accurate, it was one of those nearly oops, moments, that we managed to avert a really tricky piece of research, because it just looks so conclusive,
Mell 21:44
It is pointing out the fact that you have to double and double and double check again, just to make sure that the fact that you're actually got in front of you, you can piece it together.
Nick Barratt 21:55
And also what the document is saying is accurate in terms of what's been put on it. You know, there's this whole debate in the world of genealogy about what is true. And if you're looking at the hierarchy of truth, at the very bottom tends to be oral history, because people could make stuff up, then you get the solidity of state archives, what you put on a census return or a certificate must be true. And then at the top, you've got DNA, because clearly your bloodlines don't lie. Actually, the more you poke and prod around some of those things, they are open to interpretation. Just because someone put something down on an official document doesn't mean it's true. As we all know, people in census returns have magical ages, that float up and down according to how they're feeling on that given day. Or maybe they just don't know, people's occupations are often rather elevated when it comes to marriage, particularly that's the father to give one a certain status and standing one might not otherwise have, you know, it's simple. It's it's simply humans being humans, telling stories, which evolve and change every time you tell them. Putting stuff down, that essentially reinforces who your impression of what you are looks like. DNA is an interesting one. Because even that is open to challenge these days, the more we understand the human genome, the more the complexity of connectivity starts to become clear. So you've got to do that blend of all of them, you need to check and challenge across different source types, as well as different sources.
Mell 23:16
If you class yourself as a genealogist slash researcher or a researcher slash, genealogist,
Nick Barratt 23:23
I'm going to break the shackles of your determination there, I'm going to go to I'm a historian that likes exploring personal heritage, I'll do that deliberately because I'm not a genealogist exploring genealogy is part of the toolkit of looking at family history. But family history is part of a wider understanding of one's personal heritage, which links you to people and place and social history. And I approached this as a historian with a range of research skills that can find this stuff out. So there you go, pick the bones out of that.
Mell 23:55
You've also been involved in the House Detectives, and which there's a whole this whole breakaway group that are just interested in the history of the house they live in or own at that time. Is that a deliberate sort of step or development or was a completely different company with a completely different idea?
Nick Barratt 24:10
Oh, it pre-dates Who do you think you are? By quite some time? That was my first break as you if you like, into television, leaving aside an episode of rainbow when I was seven and appeared walking down the road with Jeffrey digging up worms, but that's a whole different story. No, House Detectives pre-dates, Who do you think you are?, by number of years? I got involved with that by complete accident. I was still working at the Public Record Office now the National Archives on one of the enquiry desks, when a researcher came up and asked me if I could help them look into the history of this house and one thing led to another it turns out they were working on the second series of House Detectives, so they asked me to come on board and help with the research and so I did a few on screen bits and then Like I did with Who do you think you are? Built a bit of research team and uncovered the houses that way? Nowadays we've got A House through Time. And again, it's much more of a Who do You Think You Are? style approach which is deeper social history, whereas House Detectives was a bit of a postcard for people who wanted to sell their houses and get a nice TV assessment of how historical wonderful it really was. If I'm being a bit uncharitable, he didn't far more than that, but it was half an hour. And it was quite superficial compared to the work that we see on a House Through Time. But again, it's all part of this interest in hidden histories, and the sorts of things you don't see in textbooks at schools. The history of house tells you about the local history, I teach a course in Dundee, and most of the time, it's giving people the research methodology, but then asking them to use the house to investigate the occupants and tell us a bit about their lives and what that means for the social history. And how did the area evolve, and it's about context, everything we look at still tells us more about the bigger picture. And that's what I find so fascinating about all of this style of history.
Mell 25:55
I could spend hours, literally hours chatting to you about different aspects of the program and research and everything. Overall, You've obviously done your own tree,
Nick Barratt 26:04
I have, I have found some Who Do You Think You Are? moments of my own. I come from a family where there have been some family historians working away in the past. My uncle, for example, researched the Barratt line quite extensively and all the various branches, although he never really talked about his uncle, my great uncle. And when various records were released by the National Archives several years ago, now, we got very excited, because they emerged in a part of the catalog associated with the Secret Service's MI5, to be precise. So immediately, we thought, wow, James Bond is in our family tree. How cool is that? It's amazing. And then we looked at the description. And it was MI5 surveillance of suspected Soviet operatives in the UK. Oh God no! Because Soviet spy in the family that's less good did a bit of digging around that. And that was there was so much coming out of that about what my great uncle was doing and with whom he was doing it, the impact on Russian thinking in the decade before the Second World War, the influence and shift from paid recruitment of people like himself to ideological recruitment, hence the Cambridge Spy Ring. He was at the heart of all of that. So that was one bit. But then I guess, recently, I've been really picking away at my grandmother's story, we always thought it was the ultimate brick wall. Not only was she illegitimate, and not only did we didn't know the names of any of her parents, but she was born in Belgium, just before the start of the First World War where records were patchy. So we looked into it, there was nothing. And only in the last few years, we've uncovered this whole story about what we think might have been going on. So yes, I have been doing my own, I have got that badge of honor. Now, I have researched and really done the whole ancestral tourism thing going around different parts of the world trying to find out more about her backstory. And there's still more to find. So I feel like I can now preach with the converted rather than to them.
Mell 28:05
To finish off with, if people want to find it either more about you or more about what you do, is there a place they can visit or start looking for?
Nick Barratt 28:16
Oh, you know, I'm really lazy, when it comes to promoting myself and what I do. Anyone who knows me will agree with that. I do have a website. I mean, it's goodness, what is it, I think is Nickbarratt.co.uk. It just simply lists some of the stuff I've done and some of the talks I can provide. I occasionally put stuff on X, formerly Twitter @familyhistorySh. It was meant to write show, but I ran out of letters. So at family history sh. Sh is my handle. And I occasionally put some stuff up there. But I do a range of talks to lots of family history societies around the country. So if anyone is interested, either check out and see whether I've been booked in or get on to your events, Secretary. And I'd be very happy to come and talk to you about more of this stuff.
Mell 29:03
Thank you very much Nick Barratt, as I say I could carry on talking for hours when we both have busy lives and things to get on with. But thank you very much for your time and the fantastic insight into a whole TV genre.
Nick Barratt 29:14
It's an absolute pleasure. Thanks so much for having me on. I really appreciate it.
Mell 29:18
Join me next month with another episode of Armchair Genealogy. Until then, please share and repost the link to the podcast to anyone that you think would be interested and bear in mind, you might be a true genealogist if dead people are more interesting to you than the living until the next episode. Happy sleuthing.
Jingle 29:40
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