© Provided by The GuardianPhotograph: BBC/Minnow Films
During the second world war, 240,000 African American servicemen were stationed in Britain. More than a few dated British women and yielded to Marvin Gaye's beautiful injunction to get it on. The result was about 8,000 mixed-race babies, one of whom grew up to be 75-year-old Bill from Leicester.
Late in life, Bill decided to find out what became of his dad, a black US army corporal. Why had his father returned to the US, leaving behind the British lover he might have married and a son he might have dandled?
Stacey Dooley's BBC Two show resembles the BBC's Who Do You Think You Are?, or ITV's DNA Journey, in using genetics and genealogy to answer such heartbreaking questions. But her show doesn't need celebrities to gild its drama. Here, for instance, we also followed lavishly bearded Richard, a 53-year-old Devonian who had just discovered that the man he called Dad was not his biological father. Could no-less-hirsute Brendon be the brother with whom Richard could have spent the past half century? And Charlie, a Welsh woman desperate to find out that she was not going to pass on her father's Huntington's disease to her son.
Of these three stories, Bill's was most topical. There could hardly be a more poignant moment to trace the ancestry of a mixed-race Briton than today. While, according to Meghan and Harry, a senior royal worried about the skin colour of their then-unborn mixed-race baby, such sentiments are increasingly absurd in, to quote the title of Hugh Muir's ironically titled Guardian column, Hideously diverse Britain.
Bill was helped in his quest by the genial and ubiquitous Dooley and by Prof Turi King, the University of Leicester geneticist who found fame as head of the team that identified the bones found beneath a car park as being those of Richard III. Perhaps she might perform a similar marvel and help Bill find the dad he had only seen in a long-lost photograph.
And so Bill gave a saliva sample. From it - like the game Japanese people play of putting scraps of paper into water that when wet bloom into flowers, houses and people - a whole past rose up from Bill's spittle: of African villages, slave ships, American plantations and brutalisation. King found that Bill's genetic inheritance suggested that his African ancestors were from the Bantu-speaking regions of today's Cameroon and Congo. Their enslaved descendants probably worked in cotton or tobacco fields in North Carolina or Virginia. Later descendants moved to Texas. It was there, in 1933, that a baby boy called Don was born, the half-brother Bill never knew. From the get-go, Bill liked the sound of Don. He was nicknamed Fireball Willy because of his baseball pitching, and was the first African American to play ball in an otherwise all-white team.
© Photograph: BBC/Minnow FilmsBill in DNA Family Secrets.
There were answers about why Bill never knew his father. In Texas, mixed-race relationships were outlawed. Moreover, King told him, his father's commanding officer would not have allowed him to marry Bill's mother. But surely, I wanted to object, mixed-race relationships were not illegal in postwar Leicestershire? Couldn't Bill's dad have settled in the east Midlands and brought his American family over here? Or would that have been impossible?
Academic questions. Bill's father is dead, and so is Don. What remain are old family photographs of Bill's dad from his postwar Texas life. What remain, too, are Regina and Phyllis, Bill's two African American cousins. There they were, tearing up on a Texas sofa over video chat while Bill told them he wanted to climb through the screen to hug them. It wasn't just the royal scandal of the past few weeks that made me well up at this sweet reunion, nor all the garbage about there being a necessary contradiction between being black and British. It was the sight of three humans, one separated from the others by an ocean, all now more profoundly connected than they might have imagined.
But genetics, like God, giveth and it taketh away. In the end, DNA tests proved that the sumptuously bearded Richard had not found his biological father; worse, equally hirsute Brendon turned out not to be his blood brother. But blood isn't everything, nor is DNA. Richard and Brendon had found a bond, a fondness through the very process of finding that they were not related. Fingers crossed these bearded soulmates will stay in touch, ideally forming a ZZ Top tribute act. Britain should be diverse enough for even that.