Television
You're not who we think you are
Published 21 August 2008
Chinks in Johnson's charm armoury appear in a look at his colourful ancestry
Who Do You Think You Are?
BBC1
As all scholars of Jane Austen know, charm is a dangerous thing. Beguiling, yet Parma-ham-thin, it hides all manner of sins. Don't believe those who tell you that it is only good manners; charm is a strategy.
Take Boris Johnson. His infamous charm was deployed with some force during Who Do You Think You Are? (20 August, 9pm). "Cripes!" he'd say. Or: "Wowee! Stone the crows!" Like he'd just walked straight out of the pages of the Beano. This stuff is meant to make you smile but, in this instance, I had a sense that it was also deftly covering a certain lack of interest in the project at hand. How had the new London mayor found the time to get involved in this venture? Presumably, it was filmed before his election campaign seriously got going. Answer: he hadn't, really. Boris simply showed up and tried to feign interest in what the Turkish and German historians told him.
On foreigners, of course, the charm has a varied effect. When, in Turkey, he referred to Mustafa Kemal Atatürk as the man whose face "adorns every municipal dog pound", the schoolboy irreverence went down like a hijab at a fashionable Istanbul discotheque.
Then again, perhaps Boris really doesn't take anything seriously - except, of course, for his own ambition. He claimed, for the benefit of the cameras, to be interested in the stories of his paternal great-grandfather Ali Kemal, a Turkish journalist and politician, and of his paternal grandmother's de Pfeffel relatives, whom Granny had always claimed were French toffs of the highest order (she had once owned the silverware to prove it).
I couldn't give a toss if Boris is, as it now turns out, the great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-illegitimate-grandson of George II, but I was gripped by the story of Ali Kemal and his English wife, even if I did find it hard to believe that Johnson and his father, Stanley, really did not already know how he had died (Kemal was murdered by nationalists after Atatürk's rise, in revenge for his role in a government that had suppressed them). Boris, however, was strangely unmoved. In Istanbul, he was shown a photo of his great-grandfather's body, hanging from a tree after the crowd had stoned him to death (they also stole everything on him, including his trousers). His face briefly reddened. "Bastards!" he said. Then, inevitably, came the joke. "Maybe he's a lesson in not sticking to your guns for too long!" he said, his mouth curling at the corners. Right. And how useful to get that one learned just as you take over running one of the biggest cities in the world.
Do I sound like a humourless prig? Yes. I just wish that people weren't so taken in by this stuff. Self-pity is grotesque, and watching Patsy Kensit weep over her criminal pa and his associates the previous week had driven me nuts for that very reason. But this was worse. Deflationary jokes have their place, but you can't scatter them over everything, especially if you are a politician.
Oh, well. The mask is bound to slip eventually, Mr Wickham- style - and actually we got a flash of slippage here. As they examined the relevant birth certificates together, Stanley Johnson, a wannabe MP, just couldn't help himself. "If I was a Kemal, I might be on the Tory A-list!" he said. To which his son responded: "Tell David Cameron that you're Stanley Kemal!" Which rather suggests that Boris thinks that Dave's efforts to get more people from ethnic minorities to stand as Conservative candidates are just so much political correctness.
Oh, dear. He needs to watch that sort of thing. Such stick-in-the-mud attitudes are exactly what Michael Gove, the shadow schools secretary, was worrying about when, the other day, he said that the public regards Cameron as an imported "star centre-forward" who is leading a party that we suspect remains "unreformed and grumpy". Meanwhile, Who Do You Think You Are? ploughs relentlessly on. This is series five and, if you can sit through the awful title sequence - how scary-looking is Esther Rantzen's crimson hair? - it's quite revelatory in its way, nailing its celebrity guests in a manner that makes the stories of their ancestors, however recherché, almost an irrelevance.
Pick of the week
The Last Word Monologues
Starts 25 August, 10.35pm, BBC1
Three tales by Hugo "Sensitive Skin" Blick. Number one: Sheila Hancock.
Mutual Friends
Starts 26 August, 9pm, BBC1
Is this the new Cold Feet? Hmm.
My Zinc Bed
27 August, 9pm, BBC2
Uma Thurman and Paddy Considine star in David Hare's play about addiction.
Post this article to
We want to encourage people to comment on our content and to exchange views with other readers and hope this will be done on a courteous basis. However, if you encounter posts which are offensive please let us know by emailing comments@newstatesman.co.uk and we will take swift action where necessary.
