Griff Rhys Jones

Griff Rhys Jones was born on 16 November 1953 in Cardiff, Wales, and spent the better part of three decades building one of British comedy's more durable careers — moving between television, theatre, film, and eventually travel documentary with a restlessness that kept him from being pinned down too easily. He's best known to most British audiences for his long-running partnership with Mel Smith on the BBC sketch series Not the Nine O'Clock News and the subsequent Alas Smith and Jones, which ran through the 1980s and gave him a national profile that film work alone probably wouldn't have delivered. That television foundation is worth keeping in mind when you look at his screen credits, because it explains both his appeal and the kinds of projects that came to him.

The film that sits at the centre of his screen career — at least in terms of sheer ambition and cultural moment — is Morons from Outer Space (1985), a sci-fi comedy directed by Mike Hodges and co-written by Smith and Jones themselves. It's a film that doesn't get discussed enough, honestly. The premise is deliberately deflating: aliens arrive on Earth and turn out to be not superintelligent beings but ordinary, dim-witted tourists, and the comedy comes from the gap between humanity's expectations and the banal reality. Rhys Jones plays Bernard, the one alien left behind when his companions crash-land and become media celebrities, and there's something genuinely funny about watching him play straight man to a culture that's decided to worship idiots. The film wasn't a box-office triumph — it struggled to find the audience it needed — but it's a sharper piece of work than its reputation suggests.

What's striking about Rhys Jones as a performer is that he's always worked best when the material gives him something to push against. He isn't a comedian who generates energy from nowhere; he needs a context, a foil, a situation that's slightly absurd but played with total commitment. That's why the Smith and Jones partnership worked so well for so long — Smith's more physically expansive style gave Rhys Jones somewhere to direct his more contained, skeptical energy. His theatrical work, including stage productions that kept him busy across multiple decades, reinforced that instinct for timing and reaction rather than pure origination.

Morons from Outer Space remains the most significant film in his screen catalogue from this period, and it's worth watching with some patience because the jokes that land best aren't the obvious ones — they're the quieter moments where the film seems to be laughing at the audience's own hunger for spectacle as much as at the characters on screen. Hard to say if that was fully intentional, but it's there.

Later in his career, Rhys Jones shifted considerable energy toward television documentary, most notably a series of travel programmes — including one examining rivers around the world — that found a different audience entirely and showed a genuine curiosity that wasn't just performed for the camera. He can't be accused of coasting. The transition from sketch comedian to documentary presenter is a bigger gear-change than it looks, and he made it without the work feeling like a retreat.

He remains a working presence in British entertainment, someone whose career resists the kind of neat summary that profile pages usually demand. Not a film actor in the traditional sense. Not purely a television comedian. More like someone who found the edges of several different industries and worked them carefully over time, which — when you think about careers that have lasted this long — is probably the smarter approach anyway.