Monday, May 26, 2014

The Italian job

So, The Trip To Italy, then. It had much the same premise as The Trip, in that there pretty much wasn't one. Any excuse for Michael Winterbottom to get Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon back together, hamming up their own characters into caricature, riffing off each other and attempting to outdo each other with their impersonations.

If you find either of them irritating, or the fact that the pair's ongoing obsession with Alanis Morissette's Jagged Little Pill was about the only thing approximating a narrative thread running through the six episodes, then it wouldn't have been for you. But I loved it, to the point of frequently finding it falling-off-the-sofa-funny - especially the conversation about which part of Mo Farah would be the best to eat.

Where it really trumped its predecessor was in the setting - I mean, the Lake District is nice enough, but this time around it really was travel porn as well as food porn, a stunning advert for a country to which I've still never been but am now even more desperate than ever to visit.

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