"Oh my Ga - a- a- a- d!" Well, yes she did get rather irritating after a while!
What surprised me was that after all I've read the programme wasn't that different from ours on the surface, just considerably slicker in that she just whizzed around the states, met an expert, and got handed everything on a plate.
Compare that with say Sheila Hancock and her daughter going into genealogy sites at home, Stephen Fry searching census from the back of his taxi, and several of the others, it wasn't as good.
The other big difference was that they didn't seem to want to find out about the people, and the people for me are the most interesting part of it. They only seemed to want to cherrypick a couple of names who linked to famous events, never mind the chain that got the family there.
I had spent time in the US, and compared to a lot of their television it was quite detailed. If the USA wants it that way, fine, and I'll watch the rest, though I don't think I've heard of any of them?, but I just hope they don't dumb our home produced BBC series down to match
That said - I'd never seen the said Ms Parker before, I've heard her name, who hasn't, but never seen anything she'd been in. For an actress she had a very limited vocabulary (Oh my G-a-a-a-d and un- bel - iev - able ) but I was pleasantly surprised that the reaction and the excitement of telling her mother was pretty similar to, say, that of Amanda Redman.
Perhaps we're not all that different after all.
