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The Trip is heading to Greece for its fourth – and possibly final – leg. What has 10 years of sparring done to its stars?
It is mid-June in Epidaurus and the temperature is climbing towards 35 degrees. There is a burr of cicada and birdsong, and the mountains are a distant blue beyond a row of cypress trees. At the amphitheatre, regarded as the most acoustically and aesthetically perfect example of a Greek theatre, Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon stand 25 rows up, hands on hips, panamas on heads. For several minutes they bicker and berate one another; they impersonate Laurel and Hardy and Richard Burton; they discuss Pink Floyd, Ant and Dec, the nature of comedy and tragedy, until their brows dampen and their shirts stick, and they’re forced to retreat under waiting parasols. A tourist bearing the pinkened skin of the Brit abroad hovers close. “Are you Rob Brydon?” he asks brightly. “Are you doing another series of The Trip?”
They are indeed. The Trip to Greece is the fourth instalment of the series directed by Michael Winterbottom, a show that has proved something of an unlikely success. It began in 2010, when the concept demanded a degree of patience on behalf of the viewer: the pair playing augmented versions of their real-life selves, longstanding friends and colleagues who embark on a culinary tour of northern England together. It was slow and subtle, largely improvised, and filled with jokes about Romantic poets, sticky toffee pudding and a glut of Michael Caine impressions. Since then, they have taken trips to Italy and to Spain, with plots encompassing personal and professional disappointments, romantic entanglements, ruminations on success, celebrity, masculinity, Byron and Don Quixote, alongside deep-fried artichoke flowers, sea bass carpaccio and octopus. Continue reading...