The Trip

When Steve Coogan is asked by The Observer to tour the country's finest restaurants, he envisions it as the perfect getaway with his beautiful girlfriend. But, when she backs out on him, he has no one to accompany him but his best friend and source of eternal aggravation, Rob Brydon.

Years after their successful restaurant review tour of Northern Britain, Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon are commissioned for a new tour in Italy. Once again, the two comedy buddies/rivals take the landscape as well as the cuisine of that country in a trip filled with witty repartee and personal insecurities. Along the way, their own professional and personal lives comes in as these slightly older men's friendship comes through.

Due to the success of the first two trips to Northern England and Italy, the Guardian, this time in conjunction with the New York Times, asks Steve Coogan to write restaurant reviews from another week long trip, this time through Spain. Rob Brydon, Steve's companion on the other two trips, is already aware of the trip, and agrees to go in favoring it over the alternative. Beyond Steve's planned itinerary which will take them south through the center of the country to mirror a trip he did when he was eighteen, they will necessarily embark on some Don Quixote/ Sancho Panza escapades due in part to the current Terry Gilliam movie project on the pair. Like the other two trips, Steve and Rob are accompanied by a plethora of celebrities, from Mick Jagger to Michael Caine to Hugh Grant to a pair of Bonds in the form of their impersonations, but unlike those other two trips, both seem centered and grounded in all aspects of their lives. Rob is settled in his life as loving husband to Sally and father to Chloe and Charlie, while Steve is riding a high with a pair of recent Oscar nominations, being in a committed albeit long distance relationship with New York based Mischa, and having a renewed relationship with his now twenty year old son Jonathan, who will join him at the end of the trip in southern Spain. As the trip progresses, Steve ends up quietly having to deal with crisis after crisis in both his professional and personal life.

Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon are commissioned for the fourth time in ten years by the Observer to write an article on a week long culinary journey, this time through Greece. The brief is to make the historical journey, albeit truncated in it being a point A to B land trek, of Odysseus from Troy to Ithaca, meaning that they will actually start their trip in Turkey. Regardless of the seriousness or lightheartedness of their dining and road trip conversation topics, those conversations will generally degenerate into a competition of celebrity impersonations, this time necessarily including Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy seeing as to Steve's recent turn as Laurel in Stan & Ollie (2018). Stemming from his calls home and an encounter with a professional colleague who he ultimately has to admit he doesn't remember, Steve will find that his trip has elements of a Greek tragedy which leads to thoughts of his own mortality.