Could you be related to someone famous? Well, yes. There are a lot of famous people in this country now, and a lot of famous long-dead explorers and writers and train inventors previously, and the way generations work – a marriage here, a bloodline there, a sojourn to Scotland for 300 years – it would be weirder if you weren’t.
But could you make a TV show out of that ancestral quirk? Channel 4 seems to think so, with Fame in the Family (Mon to Fri, 5.30pm), a reverse Who Do You Think You Are?, only with fewer shots of librarians and sobbing and more of getting day-drunk over dinner.
The format is this: four strangers take a DNA test, and at least one of them is vaguely related to a vaguely famous person. All four are summoned to a meal and given a bizarre box of clues about the famous person – often these clues are, literally, “a piece of paper someone has printed out”, to give you an idea of how charmingly lo-fi the whole enterprise is – before the famous person arrives and they all say, “Wow”. The first famous person is Craig Revel Horwood, to show the calibre of celebrity we’re talking about. The second is Channel 4’s pet maniac Shaun Ryder. After three rounds of guessing and some awkward talking-while-trying-to-eat, each stranger has to guess who is related to the celebrity before the big reveal. If they are right (they are never right), they win £1,000. The two slightly related people, celebrity and civilian, hug at the end. That’s the show.
Is it good? Weirdly, yes. There’s a certain timbre to Channel 4 teatime TV – the Four in a Beds, Come Dine With Mes, the Coach Trips – that is mild and peril-free, the sort of ambient television that is perfect to chain-watch on an all-day hangover. Fame in the Family fits neatly into that timeslot: it’s on the outer reaches of interesting, like talking to someone at a wedding for just long enough to find one thing in common (“Oh your mum is from Northumberland? My grandmother was from Northumberland! No I’ve never been … ”). It keeps you occupied without troubling you to have to stay awake.
There are two things that are strikingly delightful about all this: first, nobody on this programme has any idea what tone or shape it will take (this includes the celebrity guests!) and it shows. The contestants keep sniping at each other in their mid-meal interviews – “I think June might be a dark horse, you know” – as if sharing some mild fact about how her mother used to practise clog dancing makes her more related to Craig Revel Horwood than the actual DNA test. Odd streaks of jealousy come out when one stranger has slightly more in common with Shaun Ryder’s uncle than the others; there are weird Cluedo-esque attempts to one-up and outguess each other. Nobody knows what’s happening but they all know that, by the end of the day, one of them is going home with the phone number of a Strictly judge. It adds a frisson of panic to everything they do.
The second thing is, and there is no unpretentious way of saying this, the dynamic of watching celebrities interact with non-celebrities is refreshingly enjoyable. I am bored of seeing celebrities talk to other celebrities on panel and chat shows: it’s all just a charisma-off where everyone knows to keep their anecdotes nice and tight for the edit, and Jimmy Carr is doing that laugh in the background somewhere. Fame in the Family gives the celebrities just long enough to dazzle some strangers with their sheer famousness, before it quickly wears off: over the meal they actually have to get to know each other, to try to find common ground.
It’s occasionally (especially with Craig Revel Horwood: he comes off amazingly, and there is now no one in Britain I’d rather go for champagne with) like watching a king hold court. And then the reveal, every single time, is completely underwhelming – “Craig and Holly share Welsh ancestry. Though the others have Welsh ancestry too, it’s not the same ancestry” – then everyone half-drunkenly hugs before taking a “Related?! Gosh how weird!” selfie then going home.
That’s it! It’s perfect teatime TV! I can only hope for 500 more episodes of it. Judging by the amount of famous DNA sloshing around this island, that shouldn’t be too difficult to arrange.
