World of Chig   

7.6.08
Who are you supporting?

Euro 2008 starts today, with not one of the five British Isles teams taking part. England joins Bulgaria, Denmark and Latvia as the four countries who took part in Euro 2004 but haven't qualified this time around.

The BBC, inevitably, given the amount of money they've invested in covering the tournament, has been plugging it by asking who people will be supporting. But you can't answer the TV and radio trailers, so let's ask the same question here. I'm curious to know what affects people's choices in a competition that's devoid of British and Irish players. Are you supporting a country because a player from your club team plays for them? Are you supporting the team of your parents' country, or digging even deeper into your family ancestry to find a link with another nation? Are you supporting a team based on who has the better looking players? (As if we would ever condone anything so shallow!) Are you taking the Wogan-in-Eurovision line and just having an unfounded prejudice against all of the Eastern Europeans? Or are you just not bothering with Euro 2008 because your country's not in it?

In order to explain who I'll be supporting, I present this highly technical version of my family tree:



So, due to being 1/8 French, I will be supporting France. Allez les bleus!

The only fly in the ointment is that I drew Romania yesterday in the work sweepstake. Unfortunately, France and Romania are both in Group C, the group of death. I softened the blow of drawing the team that will probably finish last in the group (with Italy and the Netherlands also above them) by using it as an excuse to blu-tack this picture of Vlad, my very favourite Romanian in the whole wide world (sorry Cheeky Girls), to the side of my monitor at work, next to the Romanian flag. It will make work just that little bit easier to have his lovely face looking down at me for the next three weeks.

Who are you supporting in Euro 2008, and why?

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18.10.07
Who does one think one is?

It was a deliciously brilliant piece of timing for the BBC to show Matthew Pinsent's family history adventure tonight, on the day when the BBC itself is one of the main news stories, as people begin to digest the cutbacks announced yesterday. In 'Who Do You Think You Are?' tonight, BBC One played one of its trump cards, by showing just how brilliant BBC factual programming can be.

I've been hooked on WDYTYA? since it started (and this is the end of series four), but tonight's was one of the best. It sent shivers down my spine and made me very jealous that I have only traced my family tree back eight generations in one direction to one person born in the 1770s. I don't want to spoil the programme if you didn't watch Pinsent's story tonight, but let's just say he was able to go considerably further back and uncover some rather famous connections. (I haven't had a team of BBC researchers and genealogists to help me though, and he hasn't put in the hours at the Family Records Centre that I have, which is half the fun.) I strongly recommend you catch it when it's repeated. The repeats are currently running a few weeks behind the first showings (with Carol Vorderman's programme on after midnight tonight and Alistair McGowan's next week), but they're shown again, with signing, late on Thursday nights.

Pinsent's quest is the family history hunt to end them all, and will either encourage thousands more to start investigating their own family trees, or make people give up, because they know they will never...

No, enough, I'll say no more. Just look out for it when it's on again. If you are going to watch it, DON'T read this - it gives away too much information. If you happened to catch it tonight, what did you think?

Photo courtesy BBC.

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