I never doubted that the KW episode would be interesting. She isn't annoying like so many other celebs, and she doesn't go on about how she is convinced she is Irish and how she wants to find Irish ancestry by hook or by crook, which is the kind of bizarre nonsense we get a lot of in the British episodes of WDYTYA. Wanting to be Irish must be some kind of a hip fad among UK celebs, perhaps connected to their burning (narcissistic) desire to be perceived as defenders of human rights and minorities. Being Irish = goodness, being English = boring. Or something like that. Why though? Why would these (alleged) champions of equality be so biased toward one ethnic group? Isn't the whole point of liberal ideology to not be interested in that stuff? How they contradict themselves, in numerous ways...
Kate does want to find Scandinavian heritage though, because her family had been told often that they "look Scandinavian" - and she does. A Swedish ancestor, to be precise, and Winslet could not be more thrilled by this discovery.
At least until she hears the obligatory, predictable but above all unavoidable "dark 19th century stuff" that we get in nearly every episode. I am always amazed how these (clueless) celebs react to the overtly negative stuff about Victorian England and other regions during that era. European past is littered with misery, injustice, poverty, starvation, degradation and hopelessness. It wasn't always "modern, advanced and progressive" as many people might actually believe. Life was extreme misery for nearly everybody! So why these celebs would even cultivate hope that their own ancestors would be somehow exempt from all that viciousness and suffering, I have no concrete answer for such delusion and optimism.
Or maybe Kate is being a bit of a drama queen whenever she reacts to bad news about her ancestors? I am pretty sure that Kate did the show because she was genuinely interested in her own background, because why else would a world-famous actress like her do this show? For money? Not bloody likely.
Still, she is a celeb and she is an actress, so a bit of exaggerated animated reacting to things may be part of the whole thing...
It turns out that on her mother's side (where the Swedishness is) her ancestors got whipped and imprisoned for petty theft, whereas on her father's side one ancestor was a whip-meister in the British army! The irony is quite amusing, though not so much to Kate, who takes this stuff perhaps a bit too seriously. Life was extremely harsh in 19th century Sweden as well as Britain (and nearly everywhere else), so I certainly wasn't surprised by any of this.
After all, she never met these people, never will, and whatever evil happened to them occurred generations ago. Why react so badly to the death of an infant 150 years after it had died? I can understand a bit of it, but to the most part it seems absurd.
Then again, these "ancestral biographies" are stories like any others, and people react emotionally to stories...
Still, I am glad that she didn't "thank" her ancestors for being "such survivors", the way for example Shirley Ballas did in her episode. As if hers - or anybody's - ancestors survived for our benefit! They survived for themselves and their offspring. They certainly didn't do it so that Shirley can live 150 years later.
Kate does want to find Scandinavian heritage though, because her family had been told often that they "look Scandinavian" - and she does. A Swedish ancestor, to be precise, and Winslet could not be more thrilled by this discovery.
At least until she hears the obligatory, predictable but above all unavoidable "dark 19th century stuff" that we get in nearly every episode. I am always amazed how these (clueless) celebs react to the overtly negative stuff about Victorian England and other regions during that era. European past is littered with misery, injustice, poverty, starvation, degradation and hopelessness. It wasn't always "modern, advanced and progressive" as many people might actually believe. Life was extreme misery for nearly everybody! So why these celebs would even cultivate hope that their own ancestors would be somehow exempt from all that viciousness and suffering, I have no concrete answer for such delusion and optimism.
Or maybe Kate is being a bit of a drama queen whenever she reacts to bad news about her ancestors? I am pretty sure that Kate did the show because she was genuinely interested in her own background, because why else would a world-famous actress like her do this show? For money? Not bloody likely.
Still, she is a celeb and she is an actress, so a bit of exaggerated animated reacting to things may be part of the whole thing...
It turns out that on her mother's side (where the Swedishness is) her ancestors got whipped and imprisoned for petty theft, whereas on her father's side one ancestor was a whip-meister in the British army! The irony is quite amusing, though not so much to Kate, who takes this stuff perhaps a bit too seriously. Life was extremely harsh in 19th century Sweden as well as Britain (and nearly everywhere else), so I certainly wasn't surprised by any of this.
After all, she never met these people, never will, and whatever evil happened to them occurred generations ago. Why react so badly to the death of an infant 150 years after it had died? I can understand a bit of it, but to the most part it seems absurd.
Then again, these "ancestral biographies" are stories like any others, and people react emotionally to stories...
Still, I am glad that she didn't "thank" her ancestors for being "such survivors", the way for example Shirley Ballas did in her episode. As if hers - or anybody's - ancestors survived for our benefit! They survived for themselves and their offspring. They certainly didn't do it so that Shirley can live 150 years later.
