Rob Brydon

Radio Times review

In theory we have a new game show here but in practice, that's overstating it. This is a chance for Rob Brydon to flex his comic muscles as bullying, joshing host. There's a good ten minutes of jokey chit-chat at the start as we meet the celebrity panel ("Emilia Fox... have you ever done a real autopsy?") and then the contestants. The game itself is so barely there that after half an hour (and this really isn't a spoiler) only one point has been scored.

But Brydon's relentless comic energy drives the thing on as he tries to get Simon Callow to tango or has Louis Smith sing a song with James Corden. It's hard to resist smiling in the face of the Brydon hurricane but we could do with more game and less show.

For all its obvious charms, the first run of Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon's improvised sitcom did sometimes seem like little more than a Parmesan-crisp thin excuse for its stars to gorge on high-end scran. Credit all the Mediterranean cuisine being scarfed down or just tighter direction from Michael Winterbottom, but this sequel outing to Italy feels more substantial. Tonight's episode features a plot, with the pair venturing to Shelley's house by boat, and Brydon chirpsing one of the crew. Impressions galore - Tom Jones, Pierce Brosnan - too.

Radio Times review

It's pure pleasure, this. Something so seemingly simple really shouldn't work as well at it does, but boy is it funny. Rob Brydon and Steve Coogan - or the versions they play of themselves - have reached San Fruttuoso in Liguria on their tour of Italy.

They take a beautiful yacht to a restaurant on a pebbled cove where, over lunch, they do impressions. Quite why two men doing silly voices filmed with the production values of an arthouse movie is so funny, Lord knows.

There's Steve doing Saddam Hussein's Frank Spencer impression or Rob doing Roger Moore playing Tony Blair. There's a lovely bit about what the different intonations that newsreaders use mean.

But underneath the comedy back-and-forth there's a poignant undertow about middle-aged friendship and the status games men play. It's cleverly done and not quite like anything else, ever.

What The Trip To Italy tells us about male friendship

Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon's gently competitive riffs and references highlight the changing composition of modern male relationships.

Rob Brydon: comedy, politics & dining with Steve Coogan

Lazy criticism, women on comedy panel shows and intimations of mortality... As he chews the fat with Steve Coogan in another series of The Trip, the new prince of Saturday-night TV confesses that he has a lot on his plate.

The Trip to Italy, BBC Two, review

Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon's follow-up to 2010's The Trip is infantile, inspired, and as inconsequential as it was inveterately un-PC, says Mark Monahan.

The Trip to Italy was travel porn with smiles. Knowing smirks, occasional laughy guffaws: but good smart tetchy humour throughout, as Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon reunited to busk off each other's ego - quite how close to those being their alter-egos is uncertain, though I suspect the difference has long been moot - but this time in Italy, eating roisteringly good food in the famous Trattoria della Posta in Langhe (near Barolo, yum, and splendid it looked) and alarming only slightly the lieges with sudden impressions of Ronnie Corbett, Al Pacino or, wonderfully improvised, mumbling Batman characters. Never less than clever, and promises much as the weeks roll on, not least the glorious intercut views of red-boiling kitchens and sweet, warm seas.

Apparently this paper, The Observer, sent both of them there as food/holiday critics. Not true (or is it? Ref! I haven't had a hol for three years). One thing's certain. We did send Kim Philby as a correspondent to Beirut, where he was finally cornered by his friend Elliot. We were founded in 1791; occasional mistakes have been made.

The Trip - or, as it's now titled, The Trip to Italy - returned on Friday on BBC Two. Essentially it's the same show: Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon, playing caricatures of themselves, talk rubbish and swap impressions in restaurants. It's very funny.

Now and again it threatens to turn into a deeper, more mature sort of programme, about Coogan and Brydon's relationships with their families.
Personally I'd rather it didn't. I could easily take half an hour of solid nonsense from them. There's almost no plot, but in the interests of more nonsense I'd accept less.

Radio Times review

I had some sympathy with those who thought 2010's first series of The Trip was too self-referential and up itself. They'll probably think the same of this second series, where Rob Brydon and Steve Coogan play versions of themselves pootling through Italy dining in high-end restaurants. None of this alters the fact that it's helplessly, hilariously funny.

Both men are obviously a bit older and a bit more aware of the passage of time. Coogan's worried that his career might be hitting the doldrums and that he doesn't have his old pulling-power now that women see him as middle-aged.

He and Brydon have a good-naturedly barbed friendship as they chat amicably over dinner, kicking around each other's insecurities. The best bits are their competitive impressions - Brydon doing a B&Q advert voiceover as Tom Hardy's Batman villain Bane is a hoot.

The Trip to Italy: Britain's best ever improv comedy?

Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon's culinary travelogue comedy The Trip to Italy may well be the most sustained and successful example of genuine ad-libbing that Britain has ever produced.