Linda Herrick: Ancestral quest heads Downunder

Aussie actor Jack Thompson never knew much about his family until he started digging into the past in the first episode of the Australian version of Who Do You Think You Are? which began on Sky's UKTV channel on Monday.

His mother died when he was four and with his father unable to cope he was adopted out to the Thompson family when he was 10. Fittingly, his original surname was Pain.

Thompson's great gift as an actor is his remarkable synthesis of blokeness, humour and sensitivity, and the latter two qualities certainly came to the fore as he embarked on his journey back through the unknown generations. It started at Katoomba, where he'd just bought a pub with his eldest son Patrick. It ended with the discovery of his great-great-great grandfather Patrick, a man he'd never heard of before, who was an Irish Catholic convict deported to Australia in 1836. When Thompson found out Patrick was a highway robber, he was delighted, hooting with pleasure about descending from "Australian royalty".

Thompson's Aunt Bev got him started with a photo of his great grandfather, a stern-looking man known even to his own family as Captain Pain. As Thompson gazed at the seafarer-turned-wharfie, tears welled in his eyes. He was seeing himself in the photo, identifying with an ancestor for the first time in his life.

As Thompson kept peeling back the layers, he found stories of suicide, bankruptcy, wealth, family rifts, and snobbery in the so-called classless society - ordinary stories which we might all find in our family histories but rarely have the resources or know-how to explore.

The meticulous attention to detail always exemplified in the British series was displayed here as well. Towards the end, Thompson travelled to Ireland to learn about Patrick's crime and visit his birthplace. As he left, he observed that he wasn't quite sure at this stage how all this would affect him. It was too soon to absorb it all.

If the rest of the series - which includes Ita Buttrose, Cathy Freeman and Kate Ceberano - proves as moving as the debut, this looks like a Monday night must-see. It was just so interesting.

You couldn't say the same of the latest Gordon Ramsay incarnation, Cookalong Live (TV One, Saturday). What a tedious set-up. Ramsay is in "positive" mode, which doesn't ring entirely true, cooking to a food "theme" (the first was a retro 70s "feast") in front of a live audience, alongside a celebrity guest plus a couple of kitchen amateurs beamed on to screens in the studio.

Too many cooks spoil the broth; then Ramsay overegged it even more by competing in cookoffs against celebrities including, weirdly, Germaine Greer. Being with Greer set Ramsay off on corny rants: "no mother-in-law jokes for me tonight", shouting "feminist off, out of my kitchen" when her duck l'orange lost the taste test. This is desperate stuff.

To top it off, the music - Dick Dale and the Del Tones' Misilou (refer Pulp Fiction) - was annoyingly overused. Ramsay should get back to his roots.