The Trip (Steve Coogan's new comedy show)

Monzo wrote: »

This is on BBC2 tomorrow lads, 11.50 I think. Half an hour long.

It is somewhere in the region of lunchtime at the Inn at Whitewell, and from the dining room carries the gentle roar of the feast: spoons brush soup plates, wine glasses kiss, and conversation gathers and swells. Outside, it is a sharp, bright day and here in the Trough of Bowland, the light skims across the bare branches and seems to settle among the hills of the Hodder Valley.

Back indoors, sitting beside the log fire, is the comedian Rob Brydon. He is sipping a glass of red wine and surveying the local newspaper, pausing, occasionally, to bask in the warmth.

Into his post-prandial idyll stalks Steve Coogan; taller, sharper, slightly harried, he sits down heavily and scowls. Brydon, impervious, lowers his newspaper. "I have ordered you a sticky toffee pudding," he tells him grandly, and proceeds to quiz Coogan with a series of On This Day in History questions read aloud from the paper in a Terry Wogan voice. "1702," he begins, "King William the Third died, and Queen Anne ascended to the throne . . ."

Coogan ignores him, and the pair bicker lightly. Diners stroll past, oblivious to the famous comedians in their wake. "That is some of the nicest sticky toffee pudding . . . " Brydon purrs, devouring the entire dish. "Mmm, moreish, isn't it?" Coogan looks on, dismally. "You're eating my pudding," he says, "and we're sitting in a corridor."

In truth, Brydon has already eaten two of the puddings, and upon closer inspection looks a little green around the gills. There is an abrupt halt in the conversation. People scurry about in gilets and fleeces, carrying walkie-talkies and tape-measures. They adjust wires and lights, listen intently to headphones, and a makeup woman dashes over and dabs at the shine on Brydon's forehead.

The scene unfolding here is in fact being filmed for an episode of The Trip, a new BBC series that begins on Monday. Directed by Michael Winterbottom, Coogan and Brydon essentially play themselves, amid the premise that Coogan has angled a role as a guest restaurant reviewer for the Observer, touring the best restaurants of Lancashire, Yorkshire and the Lake District. His intention was to take a [fictional] American girlfriend named Mischa, but when he and Mischa split up shortly before the trip, he asks Brydon to accompany him in her stead.

It is a comedy of sorts, but it is much more than that. It is a homage to the north, and northern culture – its food, of course, as well as its music, its literature and its landscape. Fiction blurs with reality, and there is geology and Romanticism, sightseeing and wine-tasting and much rumination on ageing and masculinity, relationships, love, fame and comedy itself. Perhaps more than anything it is about identity – about where you belong and who you are, how others perceive you and how you perceive yourself. And it is funny, of course.

The idea was born out of A Cock and Bull Story, Winterbottom's masterful "adaptation" of the Laurence Sterne novel Tristram Shandy, which also starred Coogan and Brydon. "I'll always work with Michael," Coogan tells me that evening in the bar. "I love working with him and I trust his judgment. The very worst thing you could say about a Michael Winterbottom project is that it is a Noble Failure. It would never be a bad piece of work."

Winterbottom, it transpires, had particularly liked A Cock and Bull Story's improvised scenes between Coogan and Brydon. "He said, I want something more substantial based on what we felt when we did them," Coogan continues. "And all I could say was, 'Why do you want to do this? Why the hell do you want to do this? What is the interest?' And then he starts weaving in words like 'Coleridge', and slightly expanding on Rob's worldview." Coogan pauses a little theatrically. "I don't think Rob actually has a worldview," he says, "but you know . . . his opinion on things."

Coogan also worked with Winterbottom on the 2002 film 24 Hour Party People, and enjoyed the process – a small crew, informal, minimally scripted. "So it appears to be chaotic. They began shooting on both those films when they were half-formed, which normally would scare me – in fact it did scare me on 24 Hour Party People, I didn't know how it worked then. I wouldn't do this with anyone else," he adds. "Because I just know it wouldn't be good."

It is early afternoon, and Coogan and Brydon are sitting at a table, filming another scene. Coogan is remonstrating with Brydon for his stereotyped impression of a northern accent. It is unclear whether this is actually part of the scene, or just Coogan airing his own bugbear – though this blurred patch of reality is precisely where the series sits. The makeup woman leans across and whispers to me: "Michael works like this. You don't know what's going on. He knows what's going on . . . You just have to go with it."

The waiter brings the wine and pours a little for Coogan to taste. "Yeah, that's lovely," he says. "What are you doing with the wine-tasting?" hisses Brydon after the waiter has departed. "When you taste wine you're not saying whether you like it, you're saying if it's not corked." He illustrates his point, showing how to sip and then curtly nod. Coogan looks at him with some detachment. "Can you do that and not be camp?" he wonders. There is an awkward silence, the pair discuss their starters of scallops and tomato soup, the constitution of fishcakes, and Brydon idly sings He Ain't Heavy, He's My Brother. It's the casual conversation of people who know one another well, charged with the certain frisson of two men who have lately spent more time in one another's company than they would normally wish.

It's Coogan who breaks the volley of insults. "Deciduous trees," he says, looking out of the window. "You don't often see deciduous trees round here, because they were chopped down for firewood and for ships in the 17th and 18th centuries." These kind of comments anchor The Trip and, in particular, Coogan's character. His notes on landscape, limestone and poetry, serve to re-route the squabbling and bring a peculiar kind of melancholy to the series.

Is he genuinely interested in geology? Does Brydon truly know more about wine? Are the quarrels raging across the dinner tables of the north's best restaurants, from L'Enclume to Holbeck Ghyll, Hipping Hall to the Angel Inn, real or fattened up for the occasion? "Rob has a sort of a lightness of touch, and I'm a little more contemplative about things," Coogan explains. "I wouldn't say tortured . . . but the aspects of ourselves that help the comedy, we play up to more.

"I like playing with the fact that it might be me, to give it a bit more edge," he continues. "So some of the conversations with Rob are funny, but some of them are very uncomfortable. They're sort of genuine arguments. It's a sort of an exaggeration of real life." He thinks for a moment and plucks out an example: "He called me a prick the other day. It was slightly unwarranted, just because I'd annoyed him, and I made him apologise to me. And I meant it. The thing is," he concludes, "I quite like people, in between laughing, to feel discomfort. I'm not sure why. Rob is less comfortable with discomfort. I think he walks away from conflict, whereas I gravitate towards it."

The essence of the programme really sits here, in the relationship between Coogan and Brydon, their innate differences, and their diverging careers. Raised in Manchester, Coogan began his comedy career in Ipswich in the 1980s, supplementing stand-up with voiceover work and impressions for Spitting Image, before moving to Radio 4 to work with Chris Morris and Armando Iannucci on On the Hour. It was this programme that spawned Coogan's most popular comic creation, Alan Partridge. There have been other great characters, of course – Paul Calf, the Mancunian waster, Tommy Saxondale and Tony Ferrino among them, but few have rivalled Partridge, the gaffe-prone Norfolk chatshow and radio host with catchphrases galore.

It was Coogan who helped Brydon get his first big break. Born in Swansea, he carved out a career on BBC Radio Wales, before a move to television in the form of Marion and Geoff, a mock-umentary series in which he played a divorced taxi driver still infatuated with his ex-wife; Coogan was the associate producer. But as their careers have continued, Brydon's success, in broad, populist terms, has come to eclipse that of his mentor. He enjoyed a role in the primetime sitcom Gavin and Stacey, for example, and regularly appears on panel show programmes on both television and radio, hosting two: Annually Retentive and Would I Lie to You? He is a hugely popular standup performer and voiceover artist, and, earlier this year, launched his own chatshow, The Rob Brydon Show.

By comparison, Coogan seems to have wilfully shied away from mainstream success, taking a sideways step into film roles, playing Tony Wilson in 24 Hour Party People and Phileas Fogg in Around the World in 80 Days. In 2008, he returned to standup with a tour entitled Steve Coogan is Alan Partridge and Other Less Successful Characters. The result is that, in an age of panel show ubiquity, impressionists and Michael McIntyre roadshows, Coogan pointedly refuses to join in the giddiness.

This discrepancy helps feeds the friction in The Trip. "Ian McKellen told me I'm a national treasure," says Coogan, over the lunch table. "Ian McKellen told me I'm a very funny man," replies Brydon. "Rob," Coogan says, "I think you are one of the funniest panel show guests of the late-noughties." To which Brydon responds with a Basil Brush impression: "Come on Mr Steve! Come on Mr Steve!"

There is a scene in The Trip that sums up their diverging public profiles rather perfectly. Arriving late to Dove Cottage, William Wordsworth's home in Grasmere, the pair are only admitted because the attendant recognises Brydon from the television, asking him for an autograph for her grandson who is a huge fan of his trademark Small Man in a Box impression, in which he makes his voice sound very small and high and far away and declares "Help! I'm stuck in a box!" It is an impression so successful that it apparently now has its own iPhone app.

It is also an image evoked by some of the series's most moving scenes; in the evening, after dinner, we are shown Brydon, in bed, talking warmly on the phone to his wife, while Coogan cuts a lonely figure, standing before the mirror in his hotel bathroom, applying eye gel and attempting his own Small Man in A Box impression. "Help! Help! I'm trapped in a box!" he squeals, and there hovers the thought that maybe Coogan is a man trapped in a box, for ever unable to escape the association of Alan Partridge. "I don't care about silly voices," he half-shouts at his reflection. "They're stupid." Later, he will climb to the top of a steep hill, and into the windy nothingness bellow Partridge's famous catchphrase: "Ah-HAAAAAA!" Is it an affirmation of who he is, one wonders, or is he ostensibly throwing Alan off the cliff?

"Often a jibe against comics is 'you're not funny any more'," Coogan tells me, halfway through his fishcakes. "And Rob might say that to me sometimes, 'Why don't you just lighten up?' And I think I am still funny, but even if I wasn't, if you define yourself as funny, well . . . " he lets the threat hang incomplete. "I don't define myself as that," he says. "I define myself as lots of things, not just my career, my life."

There is a shake of the head. "I don't keep up with things in pop culture," he admits with a curmudgeonly set to his face. "Probably Rob thinks that's failing, because I won't be able to relate to ordinary people. And it might be good to keep up with pop culture, but I also think if you envelop yourself in it, it starts to rot your brain. And in some ways, I'd rather keep my imagination separate, be slightly out of touch."

Perhaps the prevailing argument running through the series is that of a contest between Coogan's north and Brydon's Wales. "The north has more cultural identity than Wales," announces Coogan at one stage. Brydon splutters. "The north isn't a country!" he replies. "Wales is a nation! The north is a district!" Coogan hurrumphs. "The north might as well be a country," he says, arguing that it has made a greater cultural contribution to mankind than Wales.

Brydon fights back with a string of impressions of Welsh stars, from Anthony Hopkins to Catherine Zeta Jones, Shirley Bassey and Shakin' Stevens. Coogan sighs. "The north is where the industrial revolution started. The railways started in Manchester." "There's railways in Wales," Brydon insists. "Colossus, who cracked the Enigma code," Coogan ploughs on, "the bouncing bomb, Manchester United, unions, people who galvanised the working people." Brydon looks suddenly puffed up with victory. "Who set up the National Health Service?" he wonders. "Aneurin Bevan. Was he from Manchester?"

For all their intersecting careers, both actors are keen to stress their distance from one another. Coogan notes that he does not socialise with Brydon, and later, when Brydon sits down with me, one of his first points is that "we're not the big buddies that some people think we are. I mean, before this I don't think I'd really seen him properly for about two years." There is no quarrel, he insists. "When we do get back together, we slot in quite easily."

Brydon admits he gets a bit upset sometimes, when they argue. "It can get a little heated and we're really nasty to each other . . . " he says, looking downcast. "It's good for him. I don't know . . . You saw today, you shake it off, and then we'll be laughing."

After all, this is, essentially, a love story. It is about a love for the north, and for Britain, of course, about love for their children and their families and their work, about rediscovering a love for life, in a funny old way. But it is also about a love for each other. As the series progresses we see how Coogan, brittle at first, begins to soften in Brydon's company. In one episode, we even see them singing Abba's The Winner Takes It All in the bar of the Yorke Arms.

"It's trying to find the meaning out of life beyond a cheap laugh," Coogan tells me. "It's not cynical – and don't get me wrong, there's some great cynical comedy. But there'll be some love within it. And if you're making anything with a comic element and you put love in it, perversely, it's the most avant-garde thing you can do."

And perhaps love is the best way to describe the relationship between Coogan and Brydon. Though it is a crabby, unacknowledged, unnamed kind of love. They are not a double act, and this is not a romance, or a buddy movie, but still, they seem to belong together, somehow. There is a scene they shoot at the Inn at Whitewell, which illustrates this well: Coogan and Brydon arrive at the hotel and head to the reception desk to check in. "Are you friends?" asks the receptionist. "No," says Brydon, "we work together." "Oh," she replies. "Are you his assistant?" Brydon pauses and smiles. "In a way," he says, "yes

ronnie3585 wrote: »

Yes.