“I am a massive nerd,” Sonia Gray admits. Attentive viewers might even see a pattern in her TV career: first as a subject on DNA Detectives, where her own ancestry was unravelled, then as the presenter of Passengers, where she investigated immigrant stories, and now as the face of My Family Mystery.
“I love a mystery,” she says. “I am your quintessential true-crime fan and I love all those elements that come into it. So, yeah, this particular show is right up my alley.”
The first story told in My Family Mystery – a great-grandfather whose account of his origins turns out to not be entirely accurate – certainly connects to Passengers. The two shows share a co-producer, Gail Wilson-Waring, who is also a genealogist. Wilson-Waring has also worked on David Lomas Investigates, and although Gray doesn’t travel around actively uniting estranged family members, there are elements of that, too.
“It’s about people,” says Gray. “I love what it means to the people. We start with a family taonga, an object, but that’s just a starting point. They want answers, they want to understand themselves. Those sort of questions that we all have. And just their courage. I’m in awe of every single person who walks down the stairs on the show, because they don’t know what we’ll be doing. We could completely blow up their families.”
The second story in episode one is different, in that it’s the history of an object – a miniature portrait brought home by a “grandmother’s first fiancé”, who fought at Monte Cassino during World War II – rather than a family, but the telling of its story provokes a genuine and unexpected emotional moment. Gray admits she didn’t see it coming.
“I don’t know anything about art and I said to the guys, is this really a story? But I went through that process and it was, wow, this is more than just a picture of a lady. That family, their passion, you see what it means to them. That’s the goal.”
Other mysteries in the series include problematic war medals, an encrypted note that seems to link to spying for the Nazis, and a phone carrying an unexplained message. Gray says that keeping all the stories in her head while filming them concurrently was a challenge. “There’s a lot of research I have to do – I am actually going through that story as you see it on screen. I’m not pretending to be surprised.”
If it catches on with viewers, My Family Mystery seems like the kind of show that could run. There must surely be many families with the kind of unanswered questions it takes up.
“Everyone’s got a family mystery. A lot of people I talk to say they do,” Gray agrees. “Paula Bennett said to me, ‘I’ve got two.’ Great! I’ll get someone to call you! Although people ask me if I have and I literally haven’t thought about it. But, yeah, it could run and run. I hope it does.”
My Family Mystery: TVNZ 1, Sunday, July 21, 7.30pm.
