Zoe Ball Reveals Harsh Roots in BBC Documentary

Johnny Ball no longer has his moptop but the 88-year-old has lost none of his lightning acumen with mental arithmetic.

Helping DJ daughter trace her family tree on ?, he performed calculations, as they combed through the censuses, to discover ages and birth dates. 

'My grandmother was 38 in 1908, so born 1870,' he announced, while she was still pushing buttons.

On shows such as Think Of A Number in the 1970s and 80s, Johnny was endlessly inventive with ways to make simple maths both interesting and easy to grasp. He combined a madcap exuberance with numerical tricks that helped viewers memorise their times tables or discover the difference between a square root and pi-r-squared.

There's nothing similar on the Beeb now, and hasn't been for years. 

It isn't just that our national broadcaster's commitment to education has been allowed to slide. Basic numeracy, like spelling and grammar, is now regarded on the Left as elitist, a form of intellectual snobbery.

The shame of it is that Zoe's investigations discovered working-class ancestors on both sides of her family for whom even the most basic education was an impossible dream. 

One of her forebears, a Cornish miner turned Northumberland greengrocer, couldn't even write his name: legal documents were signed with 'the mark of James Temby'.

Born illegitimate, James grew up in unimaginable hardship. His mother, Julia, who worked with her sisters in the copper mines around Redruth, was hauled up before the magistrates, for getting into a fight with another woman.

Her sentence was six weeks in prison or a fine of two pounds, 14 shillings and sixpence (that's £2.72 and a halfpenny, and if you can work that out in your head, there's nothing wrong with your mental arithmetic).

In 1851, when wages for workers such as Julia were about a quid a month, that fine was far too harsh to be paid. Comparing the penalty to other cases, in a leather-bound ledger the size of a barn door, Zoe realised her four-times-great-grandmother had been treated unfairly — probably because she was an unmarried mum.

Julia served her time in Bodmin Jail, with her toddler son in the stone cell beside her. Zoe bravely spent a night inside, too, though more comfortably, since the prison is now a hotel.

Another branch of the family, 400 miles to the north, suffered brutal poverty, too — sharing a four-storey tenement building in Glasgow with about 50 people crammed into a dozen rooms. Disease was rife, with a single toilet in the yard.

Death certificates showed Zoe's ancestors died of everything from tuberculosis to laryngitis, while many children didn't survive beyond their first few months.

As always with this series, it is not only the individual stories that absorb us, but the way they add up to a broader social picture . . . the sum of history.

Zoe's episode of Who Do You Think You Are? airs Tuesday 26 May at 9pm.