Griff Rhys Jones

The nation's apparently endless appetite for panel shows might just be tested to destruction by this retro news quiz helmed by Griff Rhys Jones. It's not appalling as such; at the very least, you'll crack a smile at a few of the clips. But the format's beyond tired and the premise - remembering the news of the recent past - seems like little more than an excuse to ransack the vaults for lazy comic effect. Didn't the smug funnymen of Britain have their fill of taking the piss out of Swampy back in 1996? Haven't we been encouraged to laugh at the drunken hi-jinks of the 2005 Ashes winners often enough by now? Anyway, joining Griff for this opening episode are Marcus Brigstocke, Charlie Baker, Kirsty Wark and Mickey Flanagan. They do their best, but silk purses stubbornly refuse to materialise.

A sort of Have I Got News for You from Yesterday, this comedy panel game hosted by Griff Rhys Jones must have sounded a winner when it was first pitched. The idea is for panellists to identify past events (such as the Newbury Bypass protest, the furore over Cabbage Patch dolls) from archive footage and then make witty remarks that will win them random points. It takes a while to warm up (as the teams get into the swing of it, the f-word rate rises), but even then it's more of a wry smile than a guffawing kind of show.

It's about time that someone devised a lighthearted panel show involving a bunch of British comedians - and, thankfully, Channel 4 have stepped in to fill the gaping void with this new series. Hosted by Griff Rhys Jones, with Marcus Brigstocke and Charlie Baker as regular captains, it is, as Jones admits, a "nostalgia fest", in which the teams are presented with clips of archive news footage from decades past, with all their attendant horrors of industrial strife and terrible haircuts, and attempt to show off their memories of current affairs past - both momentous and trivial.

Ubiquitous Griff Rhys Jones hosts this new comedy panel show, in which players are challenged to give "a short history of everything else". If that sounds slightly vague, then it's appropriate for the programme's rather nebulous concept. Each week, team captains Marcus Brigstocke and Charlie Baker and their guests watch varied clips of archive footage, and try to prove that they remember more about the stories behind the films than the other team. But they're really competing for points which are nonsensically allocated according to the drollness of their observations. The guests for this week's opener are broadcaster Kirsty Wark and comedian Micky Flanagan.

The show's real strength is the footage itself - the researchers have done a great job mining the archives to provide what Jones describes as "a serious nostalgia fest". Tonight there's vintage footage of Peter York discussing Sloane Rangers - "my goodness, don't they look lovely" - and a meringue pie being squished into Jeremy Clarkson's face. It may be yet another panel show, but this offbeat trip down memory lane extracts lots of humour from our social history.

Griff Rhys Jones interview

Griff Rhys Jones talks to TV Choice magazine.

New ComComedy website to broadcast stand-up gigs

Major comics including Jimmy Carr, Griff Rhys Jones and Jon Richardson will feature on the free-to-view online channel ComComedy, showcasing footage of performances from festivals worldwide.

Watching Watson & Oliver, I just find myself thinking how old-fashioned the format is. The awkward-intro routine was getting a bit old when Griff Rhys Jones and Mel Smith did it back in the late Eighties and the comic dynamic seems too obviously indebted to French and Saunders. They are both talented, though - comic actresses as well as comedians. A more up-to-date vehicle would help.

As Griff Rhys Jones made much of the phrase "unexpected item in baggage area", in an unexpected one-off celebration of, well, him. This was old-fashioned sketch stuff, none the worse for it really but therefore traditionally hit and miss, but his "unexpected item in baggage area" was the second-best bit. Rhys Jones's slumpy hangdog angry-old-man shtick gets better as he gets older (possibly aided, I seem to remember, by a period of depression) and never more so than when having to deal with, basically, a greedy robot programmed by a moron. There was also - this was the best bit - a reunion of Rhys Jones and Mel Smith, doing their men-in-white-shirts-blathering face-to-face stuff, which was very subtly scripted by John O'Farrell and reflected the real-life schism between the two, begun 16 years ago and now, at least face-to-face, resolved. Tantrums can, with age, become wearying.

The One Griff Rhys Jones review

History, as it often isn't, has not been as kind. Their comedy about ordinary blokes now seems gruellingly ordinary.