Griff Rhys Jones fronts this 2012 six-parter that treats the past like a badly assembled flat-pack: instructions optional, leftover screws inevitable. Each week Jones, team captain Marcus Brigstocke, Charlie Baker and two rotating guests compete to retell landmark events through sketches, songs and the kind of facts you’d swear were made up even when they aren’t. The studio set is a junk-shop museum of anachronisms, so a medieval peasant might hand a mobile phone to a suffragette while the scoreboard flashes “1066: Instagrammed”.
Questions range from the plausibly daft (“Which monarch invented the selfie?”) to the openly absurd (“Pitch the Industrial Revolution as a rom-com”). Points are awarded for laughs, not accuracy, and Jones keeps order with the weary air of a man who has just discovered his own Wikipedia page is mostly lies. Recurring rounds include the Props Vault, where guests must explain historical artefacts they have never seen before, and the Timeline Tangle, where chronologies are shuffled until the Black Death follows the iPhone.
The series arrived as Channel 4’s answer to BBC’s The Unbelievable Truth, but with extra cardboard costumes and a budget that suggests the licence fee was spent on biscuits. Ratings hovered around 800,000, respectable for 11 p.m. but not enough to earn a second run; repeats were last seen at 2 a.m. in 2014, keeping insomniacs modestly informed and thoroughly confused.
Production Details
Channel 4 / 1 Season / 6 Episodes / 2012
Writer(s): Griff Rhys Jones
Main Cast
