Report: Michael Hogan

Last night's popular Who Do You Think You Are? on BBC One found Lancashire funnyman Lee Mack delving into the life of his great-grandfather and fellow comic Billy.

It wasn’t all greasepaint and laughter, though, as Southport's Mack acknowledged: “Typically for a self-obsessed comedian, I’ve been trying to find out about his showbiz life but perhaps there’s something more powerful and profound here.”

So it proved - when war broke out, Billy joined the first ever 'Pals Battalion' in Liverpool and kept up morale in a cabaret troupe, The Optimists. Mack’s grasp of this was based on reference points in classic comedy: the middle-class soldiers were “very John Le Mesurier”, while The Optimists were “It Ain’t Half Hot Mum-type characters”.

As awe-struck Mack retraced Billy’s footsteps at the Somme, he heard how The Optimists even performed at the front line, fresh off the battlefield, still in their “mud-stained uniforms”.

After the war, Billy went solo (“The Robbie Williams of his day,” as Mack put it), appearing in variety theatres under the tagline “Making all Lancashire laugh”. He married an autograph hunter, quit the stage and settled down to a normal family life. Mack couldn’t help being disappointed but consoled himself that japing had been passed down through the generations.

An episode of two halves saw Mack turn to investigating his mother’s branch of the family tree. This trail led him to County Mayo, uncovering a tangled tale of illegitimate childbirth, illegal shebeens and Irish Civil War. Mack had long considered his great-grandmother Delia cold for deserting her infant son Joe. Hearing her plight made him more sympathetic.

Mack is an old-fashioned stand-up, with funny bones and lightning wit. His quips often went over the head of the tweedy historians he was meeting but jollied along proceedings for us viewers.

This was a lower-key, less exotic affair than the series opener with Olivia Colman. There were no tears and Mack never strayed further than 400 miles from home. Yet, it was no less fascinating for it.

Mack didn’t, as he’d joked, “find out I own a castle” but did make sense of his family history: why Delia did what she did, why Joe was always “a worrier”, how Billy was a hero for more than just joke-telling.

As Mack mused at this film’s conclusion: “Ancestors can feel abstract but once you start looking into it, you soon get wrapped up and they become real people.”

Indeed so.

Click here to watch the programme: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b0bbzh45