Ainsley Harriott heads to the West Indies to uncover his roots and discovers that Caribbean history isn’t quite as “black and white” as he’d imagined, as the series in which famous names venture on a journey of discovery into their ancestors’ pasts continues.

On arrival in Jamaica, Ainsley thinks he knows his father’s family history. He’s been told that his grandmother’s family came to Jamaica as indentured labourers from India. Ainsley wants to discover where exactly in India his great-grandparents came from but, as he begins his research, he’s shocked to find himself heading down a very different path to the one he imagined.

Ainsley thought his grandfather’s ancestry was equally straightforward. He knows his great-grandfather was in the colonial West India Regiment and assumed that before that they were slaves. Heading to Barbados, he learns that his great-grandfather did have a distinguished career in the army, fighting for the British Empire in the Sierra Leone “Hut Tax War” but, apart from this, nothing else is as he thought.

How, in the time of slavery, did one of his ancestors, an unmarried “free black” woman, accumulate enough money to buy seven houses? His next discovery is even more surprising. Ainsley’s great-great-grandfather, James Gordon Harriott, wasn’t a black slave as he thought, but something very, very different.

Wednesday 10 September
9.00-10.00pm BBC ONE