Who Do You Think You Are? (BBC2)

OR Celebrity Family Tree, by any other name. In different circumstances, famous people would complain about media intrusion into their private lives. Here, they positively encourage us to delve into their family secrets as they embark on a mission to find out about their relatives.

It proved a rollercoaster ride for Bill Oddie, birdwatcher and ex-Goodie. Hardly surprising as he wanted to find out about his mother Lillian, who suffered from schizophrenia and whom he met only a handful of times. An only child, he was raised by his father Harry and his father's mother Emily.

When Oddie was treated for clinical depression four years ago, he was told he had a classic background for such an illness as he'd been abandoned by his mother. That made him determined to find out about her. "Who the Dickens were the rest of my family? I haven't a clue," said Oddie as he embarked on his climb up the family tree.

A trip to his childhood home was his first stop, where a boyhood friend jogged his memory about the time his mother was forcibly taken back to hospital in what looked like a Black Maria.

The problem of digging up information was illustrated when he met a pair of elderly women who were nurses at the psychiatric hospital in which his mother was placed. They gave conflicting accounts of Lillian's behaviour as a patient.

And so the search continued, through medical records and meetings with aunts he hadn't seen for years and other relatives he didn't know he had. Slowly the pieces of the jigsaw were assembled to compile a picture of his mother's hard life.

Particularly disturbing was the story, before her illness, of a miscarriage and then the death of a daughter at five days. Aunt Margery told how Lillian had wanted to go and tend to the screaming baby but her mother-in-law had prevented her. When she finally went upstairs, the baby was dead.

As well as telling us about Oddie's family, the programme built up a picture of what life was like for his grandparents in the mills. The origins of the Oddie family were traced to a village on the Lancashire/Yorkshire border.

A newspaper appeal led to Oddie meeting a relative, Neal Oddie, who was an amateur genealogist. Suddenly Oddie acquired 30 living relatives he didn't know existed.

Bill spotted the family resemblance when he met Neal - "small, fat and with a beard". Further proof was provided by removing their socks. Neil's second toe was longer than his big toe. Bill's was a little bit longer too. He suggested people up and down the country should inspect their toes to see if they too were related to him.

He was left saddened by what had happened to his mother and the harsh life she had. It was a moving end to his emotional journey of discovery.