Mistaken for Ukrainian: John Bishop's New York story lands for BBC
Under the Graham Norton clip, viewers from Hull, Sunderland and Freiburg are trading their own stories of accents nobody could place.
BBCStory of Why this story? The video opened at a pace of 232,665 views a day, 26 times a normal first day on this channel (9,100).
John Bishop's accent is lost on Americans... - BBC
Third clip, same sofa. After Florence Pugh's ear for accents and John Bishop's bath-time question to Tom Cruise, the BBC's latest cut from The Graham Norton Show turns the subject back on Bishop himself. It passed 180,000 views in its first fifteen hours, roughly twenty-five times what a new upload here usually gathers in a whole day.
The story is a simple one. Bishop, whose Liverpool voice has long been part of his act, recalls a night in New York when an audience member took him for Ukrainian. He is on the sofa to promote Wisdom of the Crowd, a new BBC entertainment quiz he hosts. Beside him are Cruise, there for the apocalyptic satire Digger, Pugh, who stars in Netflix's new East of Eden, and Lolly Adefope, who plays Abraham Lincoln's wife in the stage comedy Oh, Mary!
The comments have become a support group for the misheard. One viewer from Hull says a fellow Briton farther south took them for a foreign student. Another spent weeks believing a colleague was Spanish, until it turned out she was from Sunderland. A third met a nurse in Freiburg who spoke German with a strong Liverpool accent. Americans in the thread mostly concede the point. A few viewers notice Cruise struggling to stop laughing, and some needed a moment to place Adefope at all.
The Cruise clip from the same episode is still holding up well, with about two-thirds of this one's views. Everything else the channel posted that day, from the Strictly Movie Week trail to an It Takes Two short, has stayed in the low thousands.
Published on Trari
What viewers say
As an American… he’s not wrong. 😂
@m77563See it on YouTubeIm from hull in the uk. When i moved to city further south, someone else from the uk thought i was a foreign student
@joe94cSee it on YouTubeI started a new job, I worked with a colleague who I thought was Spanish for weeks. She was from Sunderland ....
@yezdnilSee it on YouTube
Public comments from the video's page on YouTube
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- Channel
- BBC
- Subscribers
- 15,600,000
- Channel views, pace per day
- 4,516,523 (on a normal day: 2,791,697)
- Video published
- September 30, 2026
- Video views so far
- 183,565 (less than a day online)
- Video views, pace per day
- 232,665
The numbers
For a channel that posts many clips a day, a first day like this one stands far above the usual pace.
💡 Test your knowledge
John Bishop's accent comes from Liverpool. What is the nickname for someone from that city?
People from Liverpool are called Scousers, and the local accent and dialect are known as Scouse.
