No offence to Alex Scott, but as I know nothing about football, and I don’t watch Strictly Come Dancing, I’d never heard of her. I’ve also never seen Who do you think you are?, now in its 18th series. I’ve got my hands full dealing with those relatives still alive, I can’t imagine wanting any more on my plate. ‘But Alex has Jewish ancestry.’ I’M IN! BIG FAN. WHAT TIME’S IT ON?

So when Alex initially introduces herself as ‘a true East End girl’, she doesn’t know how right she is. East London’s always been a home to immigrant groups landing upon these fair shores, or at least until property prices rise too high. With a father of Jamaican heritage, and a white mother, Alex talks candidly of ‘not being black enough to be black, not white enough to be white.’ And oh dear, with the subject of great granddad Phil G. bought up, now we’re also chucked into the mix. That’ll make things easier.

In Sandy's Row shul, the first she’s ever been in, Alex learns what for many British Jews, is a familiar story. Amongst the two million Jews who fled the pogroms in Russia at the end of the 19th century, were Alex’s great great grandparents Morris and Dora, transposed from Lithuania to London. Maybe they even came over with my own. Although I’m pretty sure none of my relatives was a runner taking illegal bets, but that, as well as Phil G’s love of dancing, are presented as precursors to Alex’s sport and rhythmic skills, a Jewish first.

This element of the show triggers my cynicism, the need to draw direct parallels between our ancestors choices and our own, when sometimes the gap is too great, the chasm between realities too wide. Where the programme works best is instead as a piecemeal history lesson. We learn about the settlement of Jews in the East End, we learn of how those with mental health were treated, or not, we learn of the fight against fascism at the Battle of Cable Street being directed as much at police as the blackshirts.

We learn of Alex’s paternal side settling as part of the Windrush generation, and then the journey continues on a free trip to Jamaica, where Alex must’ve been feeling pretty chuffed about having a Caribbean background. Having focused on the region as part of my anthropology degree, I was aware of the very harsh living conditions even post slavery, with Alex uncovering multiple family deaths from malnutrition, and it’s also revealed how nuanced skin tone was to privilege, where everything wasn’t black and white, literally.

I don’t want to spoil the biggest and what’s quite a traumatic revelation for Alex, but again, as a history lesson it’s a window to a different world, not necessarily Alex’s world. It’s how Alex deals with that news that’s the real testament to who she is. She’s resilient, she’s sensitive and she’s a fighter, and wherever and whomever she came from, anyone who had a hand in that would be proud to have her as their descendant.