Will Self reflects on the joys of genealogy - truffling in census returns and parish records and establishing "our genuine links to multiple generations of nonentities"!

"As a passionate Londoner", he writes, "I wanted to establish when the first Self had arrived in the city".

Entire family sagas, he says, are today vanishing into thin air, in an era of nuclear families. Gone are those generations of extended families where over a cup of tea, the same old stories were told about the same old relatives.

Producer: Adele Armstrong.