NEWS
Monday 19 December 2005 [PR5105]
The Open University and BBC team up for new series of the highly popular Family Ties.
Family Ties returns for a six-part series on Wednesday January 11, 2006, at 10pm on BBC Four, funded and supported by the Open University.
The need for a sense of identity and for a true understanding of family unites us all and in this compelling BBC Four documentary series, six individuals bravely embark on an often intensely emotional journey delving into their family’s past. Each 30 minute film is a journey of discovery – taking our participants on an inspirational journey. For some, the search will end with their family history exposed as nothing more than myth or delusions of grandeur. For others there is a happy ending.
Following on from the BBC’s family history season last year, Family Ties once again accompanies BBC2’s Who do You Think You Are? series which focuses on celebrities in search of their family roots.
Family Ties demonstrates how classic research and the use of family records can empower anyone with the genealogy bug. The first series so fuelled the public’s passion for finding out about their ancestry that the Family History section at bbc.co.uk/history had over two million visitors to the site. For this year the series will be additionally supported by Open2.net.
Programme 1 - On the Wrong Side of the Royal Blanket
In Alison Pierce’s family, stories of a ‘royal connection’, of a child being born ‘on the wrong side of the blanket’, have persisted for generations. This is the intriguing story about illegitimacy in late Victorian times, of a possible ‘upstairs-downstairs’ alliance between servant and master. The film follows 51-year-old Alison as she attempts to get to the bottom of a story that was passed down to her by her Great Aunt Connie, just before she died. The mystery centres on Alison’s great grandmother Naomi Kaye, who was in service as a cook in a grand house in Kent, and involves the birth of her illegitimate daughter, known in the family as ‘Annie Hardinge’. Could it be that Annie was the illegitimate daughter of a peer…or even a future king?
Programme 2 – Finding Mum
Angela Hill lost her mother when she was just nine – and as if that wasn’t painful enough, her death led to a family rift which left Angela traumatised and without family for much of her life.
When Angela’s mother died, her father went into shock. For Angela it meant going from being a pampered child, to being sent to a convent boarding school, brought up in effect by nuns, and cut off from her many loving aunts and uncles. Angela is now 57, and with her father dead and separated from her own brother, she is determined to find out for once what really happened. Her powerful and emotional journey will take her through those patchy memories – was it really family rejection or just the perceptions of a hurt little girl? - and empowered by her research, to a place where the truth, and her family, at last become part of her world.
Programme 3 – The Man from Mars
This is the personal story of the film maker Phil Stein, an intimate journey with his father and a voyage of discovery for them both. Phil spent many years apart from his father after his parents divorced when he was a baby. He felt his father disappeared from his life. But then, his father Melvin had experienced separation from his own father. In 1961 Melvin’s dad went out to buy a pack of cigarettes and never came back. Forty years on, Melvin and Phil together go in search of Melvin’s father. The film takes us from London to Phoenix Arizona, where Melvin lives today, and together they make an emotional journey to Chicago, the city of Melvin’s birth and discover the circumstances surrounding his own father’s mysterious departure.
Programme 4 – Flesh and Blood
This is a highly emotional story about family abandonment, passed down the generations – but it is also the story of Ronald Phelvin’s journey to make peace with his past.
Shortly after he was born, Ron’s mother Catherine abandoned him. By the age of seven months, little Ronald was put into a children’s home. At two he was adopted.
Twenty years ago, married and subsequently with a family of his own, Ron tried to trace his birth mother – but was devastated to discover that she had died when he was a teenager. Then suddenly a conversation with his Aunt Rose opened a door on a family mystery. Ron discovered that he has a brother. So Ron goes on a journey in search of the brother he never knew he had….but also in search of understanding and compassion for his mother, who herself suffered abandonment at the hands of her family.
Programme 5 – Anthony and Zoran’s Big Adventure
Anthony is a Mancunian with an unusual passion – as Anthony Shelmerdine-Boskovic, he is a quarter Serbian, and as his tattoo on his arm bears testament, he is obsessed with his Serbian roots. Anthony’s hero was his Serbian grandfather Zoran, who died two years ago, having spent years feeding his grandson goulash alongside epic tales of his days fighting and then fleeing the Nazis in war-torn Europe. Zoran was to see out his days in the PG Tips factory in Stretford, his hopes of returning to Serbia to find out more about the people and place he left behind, dashed by ill health. Instead, Anthony makes the journey for both of them – taking his grandfather’s ashes, in a rucksack on his back, to the country his grandfather fought for, but at the age of just 17, was forced to flee.
Programme 6 – Jamaican Roots Revival
The Johnson family are off on a family reunion…..all 250 of them! Linda and Shirley Johnson are sisters from a British mixed race family who take a trip in search of their roots to Jamaica. It’s a film about identity but also about the sort of family history generations growing up in this country can so easily lose. Linda and Shirley’s mother Joan met their Jamaican dad Johnny on the boat train from Ireland, just after the Second World War, but until Linda and Shirley were ‘discovered’ by their Jamaican family a few years ago, their connections to Jamaica were tenuous. Their story takes us on a journey through the historical links between Jamaica and Britain as the two women piece together their family story and their family’s supposed links to slavery before abolition in 1838.
Editor’s Notes
Family Ties is a BBC/Open University production. Series producer is Lynn Alleway, and directors are: Fiona Cushley (Jamaican Roots Revival), Emma Parkins (Flesh and Blood), Philippa Bradley (Anthony and Zoran’s Big Adventure), Phil Stein (The Man from Mars), Lucinda Bell (Finding Mum) & Maxine Ostwald (On The Wrong Side of the Royal Blanket). The executive producer for the BBC is Simon Ford. The executive producer for the OU is Catherine McCarthy. The series will be broadcast from Wednesday 11 January 2006 on BBC Four at 10pm for six weeks.
The Open University and BBC have been in partnership for over 30 years providing educational programming to a mass audience. In recent times this partnership has evolved from late night programming for delivering courses to peak time programmes with a broad appeal to encourage wider participation in learning.
Resources
Related courses:
§ Introduction to the Humanities
§ Start Writing Family History
§ An Introduction to the Social Sciences: Understanding Social Change
§ Princes and Peoples: France and the British Isles, 1620-1714
§ State, Economy and Nation in Nineteenth Century Europe
Web: http:// www.open2.net
Media contact:
Greg Day 020 83682904 07889 861646
Stills: http://www3.open.ac.uk/media/images
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