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Jan 14, 2025 | 
tvguide.co.uk | John Humphrys |Ed Byrne
Sky Replay3:00 AM to 4:00 AMWednesday 15 JanuaryJohn Humphrys/Ed Byrne/Katherine ParkinRadio 4 presenter John Humphrys, stand-up comedian Ed Byrne and The IT Crowd star Katherine Parkinson all join host Lee Mack on the panel show, revealing their favourite fact and trying to find out if it is scientifically accurateDuck Quacks Don't Echo airs on Sky Replay at 3:00 AM, Wednesday 15 January.
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Dec 21, 2024 | 
theguardian.com | John Humphrys
The first time it happened I wrote it off as inexperience. By “it” I mean lying on a concrete floor covered in cow shit and wondering how many bones had been broken by the cow I’d been trying to milk. Great skill is needed for the apparently simple task of attaching suction cups to a cow’s teats – especially if she has painful warts. The cows hated me (rightly so) and I hated them. Maybe I mean feared rather than hated, but it amounts to the same thing.
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Sep 27, 2024 | 
yougov.co.uk | John Humphrys
It’s been more than twenty years since I wrote my first YouGov column and this is going to be my last. You and I have addressed pretty much every subject under the sun in those years. I have asked for your thoughts on everything from the relatively trivial – the price of tickets at pop concerts – to the greatest questions confronting our nation and, indeed, the planet – from climate change to war.
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Sep 20, 2024 | 
yougov.co.uk | John Humphrys
It seems we are moving yet another step closer to a culture in which working from home has become standard practise. Indeed Labour now has a phrase for what we would once have regarded as the norm. It describes the five-day week as the ‘culture of presenteeism’ and a senior cabinet minister has said it must be ended. Do you agree? The minister in question is Jonathan Reynolds, the business secretary.
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Sep 13, 2024 | 
yougov.co.uk | John Humphrys
For reasons I shall never be able to fathom I set myself the task of reading the Bible from cover to cover when I was fifteen. Yes. Fifteen. Madness of course. If only because about 99% of it was, to an ill-educated teenager, either incredibly boring or simply incomprehensible.
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Sep 6, 2024 | 
yougov.co.uk | John Humphrys
Have you tried booking tickets for Oasis yet? Or maybe decided to use the cash for a long weekend in that rather pleasant hotel in the popular Cornish seaside resort you’ve always liked the look of? Or maybe something rather more exotic involving a transatlantic flight? Whatever your fancy you might be wise to start familiarising yourself with the concept of “dynamic pricing”.
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Aug 23, 2024 | 
yougov.co.uk | John Humphrys
This is probably the first (and certainly the last!) time I have introduced one of these columns with one of my own speeches, but I promise you it’s relevant. Twenty years ago, I was invited to deliver the prestigious annual McTaggart lecture at the Edinburgh Television Festival – one of those events attended by all the great and good of the television world. I considered myself neither great nor especially good, but I agreed because I did have something to say.
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Aug 16, 2024 | 
yougov.co.uk | John Humphrys
“It seemed a good idea at the time.”That must surely be one of the most common laments the human brain has ever created: You’ve heard one or two examples over the years I don’t doubt. The sort of ‘good idea’ that persuades someone to invest all his life savings in a company registered abroad with the promise of an unbelievable rate of return and absolutely no risk whatsoever. Obviously too good to be true - but it seemed a good idea at the time.
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Aug 9, 2024 | 
yougov.co.uk | John Humphrys
Remember the good old days of beer and sandwiches at Number Ten? Actually, that’s a slightly misleading question. They might have been good for a small number of trade union leaders and even many of their members – in the short term at least – but whether they were good for British industry is debatable. And if your memory needs refreshing, I’m referring to the sixties when Harold Wilson was prime minister and the union leaders were exceedingly powerful. The way it worked was quite simple.
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Aug 2, 2024 | 
yougov.co.uk | John Humphrys
It was entirely right and proper that the nation should have erupted in both sorrow and anger this week. Sorrow was, of course, the instinctive human response to the utterly senseless murder of three little girls and the serious wounding of eight others while they were happily dancing to the music of Taylor Swift in a holiday club in Southport. The sort of sorrow that makes every one of us who has had children of our own recoil in disbelief and overwhelming sympathy. But anger?
