Who Do You Think You Are? - Chris Ramsey

Last week's episode of Who Do You Think You Are? featured comedian Chris Ramsey, who describes himself as pretty lucky.

Was his family as lucky as him? Well, they survived some pretty horrible situations - and that's pretty lucky, at the end of the day.

The luck angle is nice - but it feels a little bit forced in the editing. 

I think it's trying just a touch too hard instead of playing it cool - but that's just my opinion, of course.

Much of the episode was based around military careers - an ancestor who served in the Royal Naval Division during the First World War, and another who served in the Navy during the Second World War.

The Royal Naval Division was essentially the Navy's land-army - and it was this division that Chris' paternal great-grandfather served in.

Miraculously, he survived the action at Gallipoli in 1915, and missed the Battle of the Somme due to a case of scabies (...which probably didn't feel that lucky at the time, since scabies is pretty gruesome, but probably was grateful for in the end.)

Chris also looked into his grandfather's war service in the Second World War.

As well as being part of the gruelling Arctic convoys - and receiving a Russian medal for his service - Alf Ramsey was one of the first people to visit Nagasaki after the detonation of the second atomic bomb.

Slightly lighter fare came in the form of a lottery one of Chris' ancestors entered - and won - in order to give birth in a charity hospital.

Medical care for pregnant women is now, thankfully, pretty standard, but it wasn't always so, and Chris' ancestor had to go through both morality-based interviews, and the lottery process, in order to have the chance of giving birth in an environment which had much better survival outcomes for both mother and child than most families could dream of.

Yet another reason to appreciate the NHS.

When you think of it, we're all pretty lucky to be here at all - given what our ancestors had to go through to get us here.

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