Now that he’s established his aristocratic lineage on Who Do You Think You Are, who better than this cockney geezer to take us on a right nutty caper?
As night follows day, as rivers flow to sea, as fourth gins unleash tears of regret, so inevitable was Danny Dyer’s Right Royal Family (BBC One). It was ordained from the moment his turn on Who Do You Think You Are? revealed him to be a descendant of Thomas Cromwell, Elizabeth Seymour and therefore also Edward III, who is his 22x great grandfather. And it was probably fast-tracked when his description on breakfast TV of David Cameron as “a twat … in Nice wiv ’is trotters up” made him the nation’s darling. Now, as our hero puts it in the opening minutes of this new – I want to say … documentary? – here he is, gathering leafy details for his family tree and learning why he is not currently “tonguing a princess” in Buckingham Palace: “We can all get regalled out of our brains. It’s going to be a right nutty royal caper.” Did I mention that Danny Dyer is a cockney? Not a mockney like Guy Ritchie, or a cockernee like Russell Brand but the genuine article, which makes it slightly less painful all round.
He first meets a historian (“geezer called Anthony”) who tells him that he can trace his history back through Louis IX, Henry II and Eleanor of Aquitaine and William the Conqueror to the Viking king Rollo. Danny is delighted – “He’s livened me right up!” – so off to Scandinavia we speed. There, Danny takes part in a battle re-enactment in period dress and unremarkable headgear (“’Orns were a myff,” he explains), eats a Viking meal of axe-split sheep’s head, shark meat and whey and, after a brief rush to the khazi, listens to a lecture on Rollo’s warrior credentials from “clever Scandinavian geezer” Dr Søren Sindbæk.
Continue reading...from The Guardian http://bit.ly/2sFfQ80
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