Meet The Izzards

Eddie explores his maternal ancestral journey – a trip that will be close to his heart, as Eddie’s mum died when he was a young boy. It’s a voyage that will take him from Southern Africa to the Red Sea, on to Turkey, and up through Italy and Scandinavia before finally reaching Britain on a journey he hopes will make him feel more connected to his mum as he bridges the gap between his genetic and own life history. En route, he'll meet local communities with whom he shares genetic markers - distant cousins separated by thousands of years of history. Eddie begins on the outskirts of Namibia’s Kalahari Desert where he meets the San Bushmen and learns to make fire. He might set tongues wagging with his painted nails, but Eddie is also moved to discover how at home he feels with his most distant ancestral cousins. He travels to Djibouti and goes fishing with a local fisherwoman at the point where the Red Sea narrows and where modern humans probably first left Africa about 60,000 years ago. Here he’s just 35kms from the Arabian country of Yemen, where it’s thought modern humans first stepped outside Africa and where Eddie himself was born. In Turkey, Eddie learns about the birth of agriculture and why he’s got blue eyes, and stays in the same hotel room that his parents honeymooned in. Travelling up into Europe, he visits Pompeii, before heading to Denmark to meet his distant Scandinavian relatives. Finally, it’s on to England where he’s introduced to two sisters who share an ancestor with Eddie as recently as 20 generations ago, before learning about his own unique genetic marker.

Eddie retraces the journey of his paternal DNA, and discovers how the male Izzards battled with the Ice Age and slept with an alien species.