At this ancestry roadshow, there may be gold in those old genes

TV REVIEW:THE ANNUAL genealogy roadshow rolled into the dome in Tralee and frocked up for two long – and boy were they long – telly nights at the start of the week. But before that a new series, actually called The Genealogy Roadshow(RTÉ1, Sunday), began, and if you're in any way interested in Irish history it's worth a watch.

The setup is a bit like the BBC’s

Antiques Roadshow

: a large crowd of people gather in a lovely historic location and stand around (which always looks a little gawpy and awkward, but never mind) while several of them have their questions answered by an expert. In this format the questions aren’t about a cracked plate left by Great-aunt Bertha but relate to family history. “I think my great-grandad’s uncle fought in the first World War and I want to know more” – that sort of thing.

In this week’s episode the location was Adare manor. The trio of experts who join the host, Derek Mooney – the genealogists Nicola Morris, John Grenham and the fantastically named Turtle Bunbury – wear their knowledge lightly. They relate sometimes complex family histories and draw elaborate family trees with an enthusiasm and a clarity that make the programme work.

The format is a little awkward, in that the people wondering about their past clearly weren’t randomers who fetched up on the day in Adare but had submitted their queries to the TV production company long before – though this isn’t made clear. So when a woman from Kilkenny wondered if she was related to Oona O’Neill, who married Charlie Chaplin (she was), the long and interesting answer was accompanied by one they had prepared earlier: a well-made short film about Chaplin, O’Neill, famine ships and the rest.

But that’s being picky. It works, it’s interesting, it’s an accessible approach to history programming and it touches on both familiar and lesser-known moments in all our pasts. As Nicola Morris explained, history is like a tapestry and family stories are the threads that make it.

RARELY A MONTH goes by without some Hitler-themed programme somewhere in the schedule. Even tonight's new Dr Whoepisode on BBC1 is called Let's Kill Hitler– which sounds suspiciously like a desperate grasp at controversy from a tanking series – so it's difficult to find a new angle, or so you might think.

But the powerful one-off drama The Man Who Crossed Hitler(BBC2, Sunday) told a little-known but fascinating story about Hans Litten, a young barrister who put Hitler in the dock in 1931.

Litten (Ed Stoppard) was a young anti-fascist lawyer in Berlin prosecuting a gang of Hitler's SA stormtroopers or brownshirts who had murdered several members of a communist club. Spurred on by fellow barrister and mentor Rudolf Olden (Anton Lesser, also seen this week in the final episode of The Hour,BBC1, Tuesday), Litten subpoenaed Hitler to the stand as a witness for the prosecution, to prove that the brownshirts were acting with the full knowledge of the Nazi party. Exposing the true nature of the event would, Litten hoped, prove to the German people what the emerging organisation, then blindsiding an economically depressed Germany with rhetoric, was really about.

It’s hard to beat a good courtroom scene on TV, and this tense one was a masterclass, with Ian Hart’s Hitler balancing the rage of a zealot just under the surface of respectability, and Stoppard’s Litten humiliating and goading him to reveal his true anti-democratic intentions. In the end judge Kurt Ohnesorge (Bill Paterson), perhaps sensing the future and fearful of Hitler’s power, came down on his side and Litten lost.

The end titles, accompanied by black-and-white photos of the protagonists, revealed that two years later, when Hitler became chancellor, he got his revenge for his courtroom humiliation. Litten was arrested and, after enduring years of torture in a concentration camp, killed himself aged 34.

Written by Mark Hayhurst, it was a deliberately stagy piece of work that could transfer to the theatre with few changes – usually the kiss of death for a TV drama, but not in this case, as the script and the performances, including that of Ruth McCabe as Litten’s supportive mother, were so strong.

MORE HISTORY, though from the gossipy end of the spectrum, and no less entertaining for that, was Wallis Simpson: The Secret Letters(Channel 4, Wednesday). The Oscar-winning The King's Speechprobably introduced a whole generation of people to the American woman at the centre of Britain's biggest royal scandal of the 20th century.

This programme, based on letters found by her biographer Anne Sebba, showed that, far from being the predatory black widow wooing poor love-blind Edward VIII away from the throne, she was in fact in love with Ernest, the husband she divorced for Edward. She ridiculed the king behind his back and, while she went into the affair with the full knowledge of her husband and believing the royal bachelor would soon move on to someone younger, she felt trapped when she realised Edward would go so far as to abdicate to keep her. He threatened to kill himself if she left him – her policy of treat ’em mean to keep ’em keen had worked too well.

The love letters to Ernest in the days leading up to the abdication and after her marriage to Edward showed how deeply she regretted her mistake – but she couldn’t exactly ditch him when he had ditched so much for her. It looks as though her biographer has succeeded in rewriting a bit of history.

BUT BACK TO the goings-on in the dome and the Rose of Tralee(RTÉ1, Monday and Tuesday), where it was business as usual – though this year the focus wasn't on Dáithí O Sé: it was shared evenly among the women whose party pieces are getting more bizarre as the years go on. Favourites were the banana song, Irish dancing to Tao Cruz and a slightly crazed hip-hop routine – not the easiest thing to pull off in high heels, an updo and a debs dress. Next year there'll be karaoke, mark my words. Every time I flicked over to the show the light was catching on yet another shiny bit of Newbridge jewellery. There must have been one for everyone in the audience. Viewer numbers are still huge, but they did drop this year – maybe, for all the polished surfaces, The Rose of Traleeis beginning to lose its shine.

tvreview@irishtimes.com

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