Peter York

  • Stand-up comedian

Press clippings

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.

Laura Pledger, The Telegraph, 12th June 2012

Henning Knows Best (Radio 2, Saturday), features comedian Henning Wehn - regularly hilarious as a guest on Radio 4's The Unbelievable Truth - looking at the British from a German point of view. The first programme was about class and, while there were some lines to make you smile (Wehn said his father told him to leave Germany in 1984 because all the jobs had been taken by "chirpy, lovable, violent Geordies" in Auf Wiedersehen Pet) much of it relied on flat cliches and we also had to suffer Peter York talking unfunny twaddle. "It's their bank balance," he said, asked for the defining clue to someone's class. Apart from a couple of nasty lines - working-class people used to be too busy working "to hunt for paedophiles or buy track suits from Sports Direct" - this was safe, obvious stuff.

Elisabeth Mahoney, The Guardian, 22nd March 2012

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