Griff Rhys Jones - Personal Life

Personal Life

Rhys Jones met his wife, Jo, a graphic designer, while working at the BBC. He has described their first meeting by saying "The day we met, I was semi-naked and she was throwing water over me." The couple have two children, and live between homes in London (previously in Islington, now in a Grade I listed house in London's West End) and Holbrook, Suffolk; the house is situated on land just below the playing fields of the Royal Hospital School. The family have a chocolate-coloured Labrador called Cadbury. Rhys Jones owns a 45-foot-long, 50-year-old blue wooden sailing yacht named Undina, which was used in Three Men in Another Boat.

A former heavy drinker, Rhys Jones is a teetotaller: "I don't drink so going to a party can become very tedious. By about 11 o'clock, everybody goes to another planet and you're not there with them, so I tend to avoid that sort of thing." He started running as a leisure pursuit in his early forties. In 2008, he presented two programmes called Losing It which were shown on BBC2, in which he discussed his own problems with anger management.

An active conservationist, Rhys Jones is the president of Civic Voice, the national organisation representing Britain's civic societies.

A resident of East Anglia, in 2002, Rhys Jones was awarded an honorary degree by the University of East Anglia. He was also awarded honorary degrees from the University of Glamorgan and University of Essex and an honorary D.Litt from Anglia Ruskin University, is a Fellow of the Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama and the Royal Society of Arts and made an Honorary Fellow of his alma mater Emmanuel College, Cambridge. In 2009 he was honoured by his father's former university, the University of Wales College of Medicine (now part of Cardiff University).