Here’s a fun game. Which of the following is not a real TV series? Bill Bailey’s Perfect Pub Walks. Extraordinary Escapes With Sandi Toksvig. Craig and Bruno’s Great British Road Trips … Trick question; they’re all real and just a fraction of the many, many lighthearted road trip series that are now an ever-present part of TV schedules.
There’s a new one to add to the list this week. Mel Giedroyc and Martin Clunes (old mates, apparently) are exploring Britain By the Book (visiting spots made famous in literature and on screen). Alan Partridge’s pitch for Youth Hostelling With Chris Eubank will probably never become a reality, but who even needs that when you have Doc Martin taking a steam train ride through Enid Blyton country?
This is just the tip of the celebrity travelogue iceberg. The trend started with Travel Man’s Richard Ayoade awkwardly making his way across stylish European city break locations in 2015. It reached its nadir by the time World’s Most Dangerous Roads, with Keith Lemon and Will Mellor, made its bumpy arrival earlier this year.
Any collection of celebrities will do. Reality TV star Mark Wright, his brother Josh and dad Big Mark bantering down a slate mine in Snowdonia (A Wright Family Holiday)? Sure. Gordon Ramsay, Gino d’Acampo and Fred Sirieix – three men with nothing in common besides knowing their way round a tasting menu – being sent everywhere from Morocco to Lapland? Why not? And last year’s Trailblazers: A Rocky Mountain Road Trip pushed the format to surreal heights, as Ruby Wax, Mel B and Emily Atack climbed the Rocky mountains as a tribute to the 19th-century adventurer Isabella Bird.
There have been some hits along the way, such as Mortimer and Whitehouse: Gone Fishing – in which Bob Mortimer and Paul Whitehouse simply explore fishing spots across the UK. But it increasingly feels like the format arrives ahead of the personalities or even the locations. Surely there have to be better guides to Italy than Danny and Dani Dyer? And did Breaking Dad (Bradley Walsh and son Barney travel the world in an RV) start with that pun? Presumably so.
At their best, these travel buddy series should showcase incredible locations and make the viewer feel as if they are tagging along on a trip that would be happening with or without a camera. That’s certainly the case for Gone Fishing and, to a certain extent, Jack Whitehall: Travels With My Father, although the success of the latter does hinge on how amusing you find the mixture of nepotism and casual racism.
So what makes this format enjoyable to watch? Jack Shillaker, executive producer of Sky’s Rob & Romesh Vs series, identifies an “authentic relationship” between the stars as the key ingredient. “You need the viewer to want to be with the hosts while they’re making each other laugh,” he says.
The fifth series of Rob Beckett and Romesh Ranganathan’s travelog has just finished and it saw the duo travel to Seoul to learn about K-pop and Las Vegas for a magic masterclass. It is an elaborate set of circumstances to make people laugh, one that feels like a logistical nightmare compared to the humble gameshow, which once acted as the home for comedians to sit around cracking jokes with their mates. Outside of the giants (Have I Got News For You, whatever it is they’re making 8 Out of 10 Cats do now) you don’t see as many of those any more. Has the travel series replaced them?
“What commissioners want tends to ebb and flow,” says Shillaker. His colleague Murray Boland agrees, pointing to the huge rise in streaming content as being behind the inexorable rise of the buddy comedy. “They’re one of the few things in a crowded market that cuts through,” he says. “Name recognition is really powerful. If you have the right name with the right kind of profile, it is absolutely what the commissioners want.”
From the inside, it seems that these types of shows are not going to be disappearing any time soon. “It has definitely yet to reach its peak,” says Boland. “The truth is that in the short term there’s going to be a lot more of it.” He says that a trend to keep an eye on will be the evolution of the “personal and purposeful” angle. Recent examples include Alan Carr and Amanda Holden’s Italian Job, in which they do up a home in rural Sicily, and Prue and Danny’s Death Road Trip, a pretty lol-free debate between Prue Leith and her son about assisted dying that was filmed across the US.
Could the next stage of the buddy comedy travel show be that they stop trying to be funny? You could argue that change has been happening for a while now.
