SO what happens when you have a mysterious grandparent whose children don't want to talk about them? Well, of course, the grandchildren are desperate to discover every spit and cough.

In my case, it's a Jewish grandfather allegedly born on the boat to America to Eastern European parents, who later arrived in London with the name of Jones.

That's all I'm supposed to know. My wife's father was sent away to live with relatives because of some never-mentioned difficulty involving her grandparents.

In actress Amanda Redman's case it was her mother, Joan Herrington, finally agreeing to discuss her tyrant father William, who fell out with his wife's illegitimate son called Cyril.

Joan's half-brother disappeared in 1940 and his relatives have searched for him ever since. Who Do You Think You Are? (BBC2, Tuesday), which has millions fascinated with the skeletons rattling around in the family closet, took up the story.

"It's all right for Amanda Redman, who wouldn't want to talk to a famous actress about her family's records?" said my wife as the TV star found doors opening in Falmouth, Ireland and Liverpool and soon discovered that sailor Cyril really did have a girl in every port.

Sadly he'd died in the arms of his daughter, Karen, in 1984. But this previously unknown cousin from Liverpool and her grandmother's family, the St Legers of Cornwall, got together for the BBC cameras for a happy reunion with the Herringtons.

"Your mother would kill you if you produced the Janovskis of New York or London," my wife said reassuringly, knowing that I'm officially banned from sticking my journalistic nose into my family history.

So I had to make do with taxing my brain on The Great British Spelling Test (ITV, Wednesday) instead. "You're on your own mate because I can't spell," said my family tree pruning expert, exiting left.

Most were expecting US-style spelling bees, but the 50 questions turned out to be based on the BBC Test The Nation format with your eyes frantically trying to spot the wrong 'un or correct example in ten or 15 seconds.

As a supposed wordsmith, I was disappointed at accumulating a mark of 80 per cent, but my excuse is that I kept abandoning hosts Gobby Logan and pun-stricken Neil Fox during the ads to watch Grand Designs on Channel 4.

The "money no object" transformation of a 300-year-old French Alps farmhouse into an eight-bed chalet was another of those mesmerising reality TV exercises.

"They wouldn't even tell Kevin McCloud the price of the 'bespoke' kitchen," whispered a colleague. And there's me worrying because my youngest phoned during my mother's 80th birthday party to ask "should the dishwasher be full of yellow water when it's finished?"

That was marginally less irritating than Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall returning with a new series of Beyond River Cottage (C4, Thursday) where he wittered on about "upwardly downsizing" to a 44-acre farm plus opening a restaurant in a nearby cowshed. Why he couldn't combine the two operations on one site wasn't explained.

"Self-sufficiency is fine if you've got plenty of money already," muttered my wife having just paid £50 for a repairer to jiggle the pump on the dishwasher.

Published: 23/10/2004