Who Do You Think You Are?

Watching this week's Who Do You Think You Are? on BBC1 last night, I was both astonished and impressed by Kim Cattrall's quest to find her grandfather who disappeared from her mother's life and who abandoned his three daughters (one of whom is Kim's mother) in order to run away to America. Kim – surely a megastar in view of the popularity of TV's Sex And The City – approached her search with humility and innocence, and was clearly in awe of the ordinary lives she encountered amongst her family along the way. The disappointment she faced when she uncovered the truth about what an absolute bastard her grandfather turned out to be, was genuinely moving.

This reminded me of a similar quest that was undertaken by my Great Aunt Dolores (she who was run down by a lorry yet survived, and who later took up playing the xylophone). She'd long since claimed to be the love-child of Coco Chanel and one day she set out to prove it. We had many happy and convivial times doing the research, I can tell you. However, one day she took me to Paris's famous Lapin Agile – a bar at the heart of artistic Montmartre where the clientele at one time consisted of a whole range of questionable characters including pimps, eccentrics, simple down-and-outers, the usual contingent of local anarchists, students from the Quatière Latin, as well as a good sprinkling of well-heeled bourgeois, intellectuals and artists, all out on the lark. Home from home for Dolores, I should think. Anyway, she claimed to have been conceived in a back room of the bar when Coco – worse for wear on absinthe – was supposed to have engaged in a brief dalliance with some Gaulois-wielding lothario or other. I'm quite surprised that my Great Aunt didn't insist on claiming that the aforesaid lothario was Picasso, or Salvador Dali or some such similar celebrity.

Anyway, the day we entered the bar there were few patrons who could be described as either bourgeois or artistic. The tables were mainly occupied by fat American tourists and geeky, blinking Japanese students and of course, there wasn't a Gaulois in sight. There was a rather surly-looking young waiter cleaning glasses behind the counter, and when Dolores chose to poke him in the stomach with her ivory-topped cane and demand to be shown the upstairs rooms, he understandably took exception. In the police station, later, she attempted to explain (in her appalling French) that the whole incident had been a mistake, and that she'd really intended to ask directions to les toilettes. When she insisted that the policeman should telephone Omar Sharif (someone else she claimed to have known) for verification of her identity, the officer in question clearly arrived at the conclusion that he was dealing with one of those famous 'English Eccentrics', and let us go.

As he shoved us out of the police station in a rather ignominious fashion, Great Aunt Dolores turned to him and – having abandoned her attempts to speak the lingo by this point – shouted in her most imperious voice: "Young man! Who do you think you are?"

The way he spat at her was a classic of cinematic dismissal. Quality.