It is a tough time for the TV travel show. It feels like a relic of a distant age, like Babycham or job security. For starters, the role of the travelogue has changed. In the evolving cultural climate, we have started to accept that simply pointing and staring at other countries and their inhabitants is no longer good enough. Throughout the era of cheap flights, when it was possible to nab a £20 seat on a plane to Pisa for the weekend to see the leaning tower, there was less call for an unqualified famous person to appear on our screens and explain why it was wonky. And let’s not even get started on the climate and the environmental impact of long-distance travel. You can see why it might be getting harder for the travelogue to thrive.
There are plenty of series trying to find a workaround, from many different angles. There’s the grand, trad adventurer, crossing continents on foot while properly engaging with geopolitical issues. There’s the ultra-local, slowburn BBC Four-type of series, in which a presenter goes for a lovely stroll, or a swim, or sails a barge, and chats to the camera about their lovely thoughts and lovely feelings. And then there’s the comedian-led approach, which mostly treats the holiday as a washing line on which to peg its sun-warmed jokes. The destination is fine, a source of passing interest, but it will never really be the star.
Rosie Jones’ Trip Hazard (23 August, 10pm, Channel 4) is in that last camp, though very much without the sun. The comedian and “national liability” visits various British destinations within a reasonable budget and tears around the place generally causing chaos.
Having done the Lake District, Whitby, Norwich and Anglesey, Jones begins this second run in Moray, Scotland. There are more episodes than series one, and each is longer, plus it has added Joanna Lumley as narrator, which is a nice touch – as if one travel presenter is waving to another.
Jones’s companion is presenter and Strictly almost-finalist AJ Odudu, and the pair have big “hen do for an outdoorsy bride” energy. It looks like a lot of fun, though perhaps less so for the guides showing them how to do things. They try clay pigeon shooting – there are plenty of gags about a woman with cerebral palsy being handed a shotgun – and whisky tasting, and they row across a loch, or part of it, and visit an eco-village where they make clay pots, or at least try to, and then they climb a mountain. It has the feel of a very British holiday, in that it’s often pouring it down and nobody really wants to be there, but everyone is going to make the bloody best of it, OK, because the queue to go through security at the airport now extends into the long-stay car park and the Airbnb was non-refundable and it was either this or glamping at the pig farm down the road, so shut up and eat your packed lunch in the car.
It’s messy and chaotic and silly, and it certainly doesn’t skimp on fun. They get the giggles over whisky (“sausage roll” is not, it turns out, a tasting note), and lose the plot over the pottery wheel, when every sentence uttered by their poor potter is caressed into a euphemism. I will never be able to watch the Great British Pottery Throwdown without thinking of their faces at the suggestion that they “stabilise the rim”. Though the general idea is that they will take on challenges, the biggest challenge of the whole episode turns out to be when the owner of the eco-village tries to get them to be silent in the “quiet garden”, where residents usually go to meditate.
The danger of taking this tone – naughty kids at the back of the class – is that it might seem sneery, but this pulls off a tricky double-hander. It is frank about the slightly grey rubbishness of certain UK holidays and the things we do to make them entertaining, while also celebrating these traditions and activities with unfettered, slightly unhinged glee, from the good parts to the bad. It feels like a very honest postcard from a sensible summer break. At the end, Odudu and Jones do eventually climb their mountain (“I thought it would be more of a big hill”) and reach the summit, only for the weather to turn so spectacularly that they barely have a view of their own hands, let alone any picture-perfect scenery. It is a highly relatable ending.
