The Sue Perkins episode of Who Do You Think You Are? (BBC One), the first of the series’ 19th run, had such a perfect story arc that it felt like a film script. At the beginning, Perkins joked that it would be great if she discovered roots in Lithuania, because that would be a match with her Great British Bake Off partner and best friend, Mel Giedroyc. And guess what?

The show also started with Perkins in the boxing ring – the one activity, she said, that gives her a sense of peace. And at the end of the episode, when she walked into the little Lithuanian church that was the only building from her family’s past that still stands today, she found it had been turned into… a boxing gym. Perkins was amazed: “The universe couldn’t have planned this better. Everything always comes full circle, but not in such a poetic way as this.”

Perkins deserved a joyous ending, because along the way her family story had been tough. An encounter with a genealogist in Bodmin was almost bleakly comic. Perkins discovered that her grandfather lost his mother when he was only six months old, but the records showed his father soon remarried.

Perkins: “Suddenly, everything is a bit rosier!” 

Genealogist: “Well…”

Perkins: “Oh, no.”

Genealogist: “His father died of tuberculosis.”

Perkins: “He’s now in the care of – we hope – his stepmother.”

Genealogist: “Er, can I stop you there…”

Perkins: “Oh, no.”

Genealogist: “Unfortunately, the stepmother has already died.”

Perkins: “This is the stuff of Dickens, isn’t it?”

But, despite the tragedy, this was ultimately a story of triumph, of overcoming life’s hurdles and getting on through sheer hard work. Both sides of Perkins’s family had tremendous drive, partly born of a need to keep moving: away from the workhouse, poverty, hostility from their neighbours. Her German-born great-grandfather was a tailor in London but during the First World War was interned at Knockaloe on the Isle of Man.

Some Who Do You Think You Are? subjects are more articulate than others. Perkins never stopped talking, and it was clear that she had done a great deal of self-examination long before the show began. Her story also provided food for thought: how much of our personality is shaped by the generations that came before?