Skip to main content

Danny Dyer is not so special

To be honest, I don't really know who Danny Dyer is, but I was forced against my will to watch some of the BAFTA TV awards last night, and one of the clips featured him being gobsmacked that he was descended from royalty, as if this somehow makes him special. It really doesn't.

Let's be clear, this isn't about my anti-monarchist leanings. What I mean is that I can guarantee that you are descended from royalty too.

There's a fascinating bit in Adam Rutherford's book A Brief History of Everyone who ever Lived that shows that if you have European blood, the chances of you not being descended from the Emperor Charlemagne are negligible. (Don't worry if you aren't at all European - you'll have a royal lineage too.) In fact you are a descendent of everyone alive in Europe in the 10th century who has living relatives now. So, if you prefer your royalty British, provided they have living relatives, you are a descendent of Alfred the Great, Rhodri the Great, almost certainly Macbeth (he's just a little late, but I had to go with him) and Brian Boru.

So, please don't bother to get excited about being descended from royalty, Danny. We all are.

Comments

  1. Exactly so. The point (if there is one) of the Dyer thing is, I suppose, that many people are unable to provide (or more likely haven't looked for) the genealogical proof of their exact royal relationship. I suspect there's a significantly smaller subset (landed gentry aside) who can draw the family tree accurately and join the relevant dots — no matter how diluted that royal connection really is. That said, I worked out that the Queen is my 22nd cousin and it gave me neither a warm glow nor a slot on a TV programme… A more interesting challenge might be to try to work out where that puts me & Mr Dyer in the line of succession… (and to discover if that gets you through passport control and onto the plane any faster).

    ReplyDelete
  2. I'd be surprised if I were related to the royalty of anywhere.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Why I hate opera

If I'm honest, the title of this post is an exaggeration to make a point. I don't really hate opera. There are a couple of operas - notably Monteverdi's Incoranazione di Poppea and Purcell's Dido & Aeneas - that I quite like. But what I do find truly sickening is the reverence with which opera is treated, as if it were some particularly great art form. Nowhere was this more obvious than in ITV's recent gut-wrenchingly awful series Pop Star to Opera Star , where the likes of Alan Tichmarsh treated the real opera singers as if they were fragile pieces on Antiques Roadshow, and the music as if it were a gift of the gods. In my opinion - and I know not everyone agrees - opera is: Mediocre music Melodramatic plots Amateurishly hammy acting A forced and unpleasant singing style Ridiculously over-supported by public funds I won't even bother to go into any detail on the plots and the acting - this is just self-evident. But the other aspects need some ex

Is 5x3 the same as 3x5?

The Internet has gone mildly bonkers over a child in America who was marked down in a test because when asked to work out 5x3 by repeated addition he/she used 5+5+5 instead of 3+3+3+3+3. Those who support the teacher say that 5x3 means 'five lots of 3' where the complainants say that 'times' is commutative (reversible) so the distinction is meaningless as 5x3 and 3x5 are indistinguishable. It's certainly true that not all mathematical operations are commutative. I think we are all comfortable that 5-3 is not the same as 3-5.  However. This not true of multiplication (of numbers). And so if there is to be any distinction, it has to be in the use of English to interpret the 'x' sign. Unfortunately, even here there is no logical way of coming up with a definitive answer. I suspect most primary school teachers would expands 'times' as 'lots of' as mentioned above. So we get 5 x 3 as '5 lots of 3'. Unfortunately that only wor

Which idiot came up with percentage-based gradient signs

Rant warning: the contents of this post could sound like something produced by UKIP. I wish to make it clear that I do not in any way support or endorse that political party. In fact it gives me the creeps. Once upon a time, the signs for a steep hill on British roads displayed the gradient in a simple, easy-to-understand form. If the hill went up, say, one yard for every three yards forward it said '1 in 3'. Then some bureaucrat came along and decided that it would be a good idea to state the slope as a percentage. So now the sign for (say) a 1 in 10 slope says 10% (I think). That 'I think' is because the percentage-based slope is so unnatural. There are two ways we conventionally measure slopes. Either on X/Y coordiates (as in 1 in 4) or using degrees - say at a 15° angle. We don't measure them in percentages. It's easy to visualize a 1 in 3 slope, or a 30 degree angle. Much less obvious what a 33.333 recurring percent slope is. And what's a 100% slope