Graham Norton was shocked. John Hurt said he was devastated. The reason? Well, if like me you watch the BBC series that traces the ancestral roots of celebrities, Who Do You Think You Are?, then you will know that it was because neither was found to be as Irish as they had originally thought.
In fact, to Hurt's mortification it was discovered that he had no trace of Irish ancestry at all, despite him for years believing, and telling anyone who would listen, that his Irish bloodline came courtesy of an out-of-marriage liaison between a distant female relative and an Irish squire.
I wonder had he discovered the fallacy of this family myth earlier in his life would Hurt have indulged quite so much in the alcohol-fuelled hellraising for which he was once legend. Being as Irish as he then thought he was, maybe he felt compelled to play the part of the stereotypical Irishman and mimic the behaviour of those "fellow" Irish thespians, Richard Harris and Peter O'Toole.
As things now stand, Hurt will just have to come to terms with his Englishness. All those years of excess for nothing, not to mention the embarrassment of having to disabuse all of the people to whom he boasted of his Irish roots: his best bet, I suppose, is just to send a tape of the programme to the friends and acquaintances that didn't get to see it and let them spread the word.
Graham Norton, from Bandon, Co Cork, was not as disappointed as Hurt upon discovering that his ancestors, too, hailed from England - Yorkshire to be precise - but he certainly was surprised. He declared at the outset of the programme: "as far back as we know . . . it's Irish, Irish, Irish" and "because clearly we're not from anywhere else. I'm Irish; I'm nothing else".
Norton, whose real name is Graham Walker, was found to be directly descended from a John Walker who came to Ireland in the 17th century as part of the Protestant Plantation. So the consensus is that he isn't really Irish after all. Though this part of his lineage was new to Norton, the feeling of being a bit of an outsider in the land of his birth won't be.
He spoke in Who Do You Think You Are?, and previously in his autobiography, of how growing up as a Protestant he was made to feel by some neighbours "like you're not Irish".
"You weren't properly Irish if you weren't Catholic and you felt slightly foreign in your own homeland."
It's tempting to dismiss this as over-sensitivity bordering on paranoia, except that similar claims have been made in the past by other southern Protestants. So do you really have to be Catholic to be considered authentically Irish? Surely not. Wolfe Tone was a Protestant, and you will be hard pressed to find anyone willing to deny him his Irishness.
So too was the first president of the Irish Free State, Douglas Hyde. Though, I have to admit, whenever someone cites Hyde as proof that there was no such thing as anti-Protestant bias in the South, the old adage about exceptions proving rules springs to mind.
Norton's family have been here since 1713 and still he was treated as an outsider.
(Let's hope none of the new "new Irish" were watching.) So is the question really about how long your family has to be in Ireland before you are properly integrated.
Hardly, such has been the amount of trans-Irish Sea immigration and emigration over millennia, who in Ireland could afford to point the finger at anyone about the length of time their people have been domiciled here? Indeed, what Irish family could claim with a straight face to be wholly native?
Perhaps, either the fact that Norton is gay, or that some people - like me, for instance - just don't find him funny, is the real reason why he was cold-shouldered.
But then, he wasn't a comedian while he was growing up, and nor, presumably, did he trumpet his sexuality.
Besides, Oscar Wilde was gay, and Protestant as well, at least until he converted to Catholicism shortly before his death, and there seems to be no problem with him being lauded as a cultural icon of Ireland.
Another revelation about Norton's past was that some of his forebears had fought as yeomen for the English during the 1798 United Irishmen rebellion.
Animosities linger long in all parts of Ireland, and maybe a grudge has been held against the extended Walker family ever since.
But if that were the case, and taking into account the centuries of intermarriage between families that were on opposing sides in various skirmishes, conflicts and wars, then about half of Ireland should be in the same boat as the Walkers.
So if it isn't about religion, how long your family has been here, or whether past political allegiances were "right", then what precisely does make a person acceptably Irish to the Irish? It beats me, but John Hurt should consider himself lucky. At least he had Englishness to fall back on.