Who Do You Think You Are? (BBC One)

Of course Boris Johnson was related to royalty. Of course he discovered this after a circuitous trawl through his family history in Who Do You Think You Are?

Sometimes it is impossible to dislike Boris: Tory or non-Tory, there is something beguiling about London’s Mayor as he shambles about on his bicycle in red woolly hat, or in and out of council offices with rucksack, lathering up a sense of drama at each twist: “Come on, what is it?”

Johnson was investigating the roots of his paternal grandparents, Exmoor farmers “grandaddy and Granny Butter”. Granny said that she had Alsatian antecedents, “from Alsace obviously, not dogs”. Stanley Johnson, Boris’s father, told him that his great-grandfather, Ali Kemal, had been a radical Turkish journalist. “Ha ha,” Stanley brayed, with multicultural roots like this, the Johnsons were the essence of the new Tories.

In Turkey, Johnson noted that his great-grandfather, in writing against the nationalist powers-that-be, had blurred the line between journalism and politics. “Cripes” and “stone the crows” he exclaimed as he read the desperate letters Kemal sent his wife as his life came under threat. Under an Allied-sponsored Government Kemal became interior minister. “This is the business,” the big blond puppy said excitedly. “Did he have a crackdown?”

The Nationalists, under their leader Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, took power again and Kemal was brutally murdered: he was stabbed and his assassins took his gold watch, even his trousers, and hanged him from a tree. Granny Butter had claimed to have aristocratic blood.

In his childhood — and photographs revealed a terrifyingly flaxen-haired young Boris — there had been rumours of a crate of silver from his antecedents, the de Pfeffels. Yes, Granny Butter’s great grandfather had been a Baron de Pfeffel but his wife Caroline held the mystery. Caroline was pregnant when she married him. “Whose interests are at stake here?” Johnson cried. Caroline was the daughter of the German Prince Paul, son of King Frederick. What a ker-Pfeffel.

“A castle needs to be reclaimed,” Johnson cried as he visited the family palace, where the programme’s accidental star — a dry German royal expert — revealed Johnson was related to the Prince of Wales and King George II, Boris’s great great great great great great great great grandfather. “If you want to sublet any of this, let me know,” the expert said. How apposite Johnson’s past encompassed a maverick journalist and scandal. For all the panto, his conclusion — we’re not the ultimate expression of our genes, but their “temporary custodians” — was cogent and piercing.

House of Saddam (BBC Two)

Igal Naor’s transfixing performance as a matted-haired Saddam Hussein, cornered near his birthplace of Tikrit in Iraq, was the centre of the final episode of House of Saddam. Alex Holmes and Stephen Butchard’s drama has been one of the best of the year, as attuned to big politics as detail, like Saddam moaning about the ants at the hideaway. An extractor fan box gave away Saddam’s hiding place, in a hole. We followed him to the moment just before he was hanged.

The most arresting image were the ripples from a stone thrown by a little boy whom he met by the river where he went to fish. Man and boy watched the ripples spread outwards: subtle symbolism, brilliant drama.

tim.teeman@thetimes.co.uk

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