A YORK pensioner made the nation smile again last night when she starred in a primetime TV gameshow.

Doris Bell, of Woodthorpe, was filmed in Parliament Street last summer for ITV’s ‘In for a Penny,’ which challenges the Great British public to take part in ‘hilariously silly games'.

Doris, the widow of a former Lord Mayor of York, Bernard Bell, was up for every daft challenge posed to her by host Stephen Mulhern and won the lot, walking away with a thousand pound prize.

The show, originally co-created by Ant and Dec for Saturday Night Takeaway, features Mulhern visiting towns and cities across the UK challenging the public to take part in games including Driving Me Round The Bend, You Are What You Eat, and Check It Out?

Doris said she had a go at every single challenge put to her and succeeded every time, including one which involved her wearing a pair of goggles and dunking for Yorkshire Puddings in a bowl of gravy.

“They wanted me to get three, which I did, but then they asked me to get another so I had gravy on my face, and then I had to ask Stephen for a kiss,” she said.

“We also sang the Grand old Duke of York, well, the first two lines because we couldn’t remember what came next.

“Then he asked me to say (the street name) ‘Whip-ma-whop-ma-gate’ so many times in so many seconds, and he then said there were a lot of ghosts in Whip-ma-whop-ma-gate, and he wanted me to be a ghost.

“I thought I would just have to wave my hands but they had this white sheet to make me look like a ghost, and I was covered from my eyebrows to the ground.”

She said she was also asked to explain what was the difference between lunch and dinner, and was then blindfolded with a mask and turned around and then asked to walk on to a carpet, which she managed.

She was also given balloons filled with water and asked to throw them at a Viking standing nearby. She failed with the first two but hit him with a third balloon. “The water went all over him,” she said.

She said other people also featured on the programme but she had been told by one of the makers she was the star of the show.