Thieving teenage sisters and a plot Dickens could’ve pinched: CHRISTOPHER STEVENS reviews last night's TV 

The Secret History Of My Family 

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You’ve got to pick a pocket or two, as that wicked old reprobate Fagin liked to remind his boys.

So it was a thrill to discover that the chap who created Fagin was not above a spot of larceny himself.

The master criminal known as ‘the Inimitable Boz’, alias Charles Dickens, stole wholesale from the work of a 19th century crime reporter named William Miles, revealed The Secret History Of My Family (BBC2).

Miles interviewed London’s criminals as they awaited trial, for a series of lurid newspaper articles in the 1830s, and heard a shameless tale from two likely lads in Newgate Gaol.

The Secret History Of My Family is the first of a four-part documentary series, based on a highly original piece of family tree research 

These boys lived with a gang of young thieves in a Shoreditch den run by an elderly Jew, who sold all the wallets and handkerchiefs they could steal. 

But one of the junior crooks was suffering pangs of guilt: he’d hurried an innocent new recruit onto an expedition and the little fellow had been caught.

You don’t need a literature degree to recognise the older boy as the Artful Dodger, and his unlucky apprentice as Oliver Twist. 

Dickens must have read Miles’s report, and adapted it as the core of his novel, three years later.

The greatest injustice, one that would have made Fagin cackle, is that while Boz became the world’s most successful writer, Miles turned to drink and died in exile in Australia. Today he lies in an unmarked grave.

All this was merely a footnote, in a highly original piece of family tree research. Miles’s star interviewees were a trio of teenage sisters — Caroline, Mary-Ann and Sarah-Eliza Gadbury, who ran a shoplifting racket out of the East End. Dressed in finery and talking posh, the girls lifted so much loot they could even afford to bribe the local coppers.

The descendants of Victorian convict Caroline Gadbury gathered at a family reunion in Tasmania, where one of her grandsons ended up as premier

But they pushed their luck too far one day in a haberdashery, trying to waltz out with ten yards of silk concealed beneath their petticoats. Mary-Ann got six months in prison — her sisters were sentenced to transportation, which meant seven years’ hard labour on the far side of the world.

It was what happened next that made this documentary, the first of a four-part series, so gripping. The story was told by the girls’ descendants . . . who became lawyers, judges, politicians, socialites and educational reformers.

One of Caroline’s grandsons ended up as premier of Tasmania. Two granddaughters set up one of Australia’s most prestigious private schools. Transportation turned out to be the best thing that could possibly happen to the ambitious and upwardly mobile Gadbury clan.

Without any celebs to burst into tears over the archives, as they generally do in Who Do You Think You Are?, the show relied on the strength of its storytelling to hold our interest. 

The three sisters were imagined as animated figures in a magic lantern display, but the pictures that mattered were the ones conjured up by imagination.

The only mis-step was director Joseph Bullman’s obsession with class. He couldn’t quite believe how thoroughly the family had transformed its social standing, and his questions kept harping on the point — until one exasperated man burst out: ‘Australians don’t talk about class. It’s very rude!’

The Secret Life Of The Family 

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Class is the whole point of The Secret Life Of The Family (C5). Despite the all-but-identical name, this is a quite different programe, a fly-on-the-wall documentary with cameras spying inside six homes across the whole range of the middle classes.

At one end of the scale there’s posh Daisy and her folks, who keep camels at their farm in Warwickshire, and at the other the Demirels in Beckenham, who might be fairly well off but converse in screeches and shrieks.

Their antics have a scripted feel: nobody forgets that the lenses are always watching, and even ordinary family activities like cookery and gardening appear to be staged.

But they can’t disguise the subtle traits that betray just where they fit in the social mosaic, whether it’s the way Daisy’s dad chunters approvingly during her driving lessons, or mum Jill Demirel’s enthusiasm for aerobics in Lycra leggings.

These details define people. Not that you could ever expect a classless Australian to understand.