As personal digital archives of multimedia data become more ubiquitous, the challenge of supporting multimodal access to such archives becomes an important research topic. In this paper we present and positively evaluate a gesture-based interface to a personal media archive which operates on a living room TV using a Wiimote. We illustrate that Wiimote interaction can outperform a point-and-click interaction as reported in a user study. In addition, a set of guidelines is presented for organising and interacting with large personal media archives in the enjoyment oriented (lean-back) environment of the living room. © 2010 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.