Danny Dyer finds out he's related to an actual saint on BBC show

After Danny Dyer’s momentous appearance on Who Do You Think You Are? in 2016, during which he discovered he was of royal lineage, he’s set to discover a further bombshell about his family tree.

It turns out that the EastEnders star is related to a saint.

Thanks to expert genealogists, Dyer discovered that his 22th great grandfather was Edward III, and that he is also distantly related to Thomas Cromwell and Elizabeth Seymour.

But now, in a new factual show called Right Royal Family for the BBC, he will discover that he’s descendant from a French saint too.

“I’m a direct descendant from a saint,” he says on the show. “Saint Louis IX, who was the King of France in, I think it was the 12th century, I can’t remember now.

“Yeah, he was a saint. I think there’s only 2000 saints ever, and he was allowed to have children – he had 11 children, and yeah, I’ve got his blood knocking about, so make of that what you will.”

“It’s just so much to take in. I’m related to a saint.”

Dyer has also hit back at those who have criticised the show on social media, of dumbing down historical matters, but having only seen the trailer so far.

“I think you need to be a fan of mine, to really, really want to invest in it,” he told Digital Spy.

“There’s been a little bit of bad press around this without people even watching a second of it. About how the BBC’s ‘dumbing down history’ just because, I don’t know why, maybe because I’ve got a working-class accent or whatever they want to say.

“I don’t get it. Judge it after you’ve watched it at least. I think people are maybe bored of that boring history formula, you know, and I think it’s a different way to learn.

“I try to be funny as much as I possibly can, and I like to embrace every historian with a big cuddle at the beginning that will make them settle down, and then just have an old chinwag about Medieval history.”

It airs on January 23.

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