BBC Two
They may be eating quail but The Trip to Italy has been all about tail. As Rob Brydon wipes the stink of Lucy snatch off him Coogan relates how he knocked the back out of Yolanda once again. The Observer is funding the kind of three-girls-a-night trim parade prime Mötley Crüe would take on only with fine food and sightseeing. The boys visit the museum in Vesuvius and regard a plaster cast in a glass display case of a 79 AD eruption victim. It’s the perfect opportunity for Rob to do his small man trapped inside a box voice. Shorty doesn’t look too happy about it but when you’re the frozen facsimile of a dry roasted antiquity fuck you have very little to smile about.
At the restaurant the amuse-bouche whets their appetite before the first course proper which for Rob is a lobster – an innocent creature the Italians brutally boil alive because of their fundamentally savage fascist culture – on a bed of ravioli and celery and for Steve a salmon salad. The salmon was probably relatively quickly dispatched but who would be surprised if they shot it in front of its family to teach them a lesson? Rockfish and sea bass courses quickly follow and with them a Michael Parkinson interview of Coogan rendered by Brydon and punctuated with Michael Blewble.
When you’re the frozen facsimile of a dry roasted antiquity fuck you have very little to smile about.
They stay at Relais Blu a hotel on the Sorrento coast, overlooking the isle of Capri. Rob gets the Greta Garbo suite where the truculent Swede would ride her conductor borefriend Leopold Stokowski senseless and this is definitely on-brand for Brydon. They visit the promisingly named Terrace of Infinity only to be disappointed by its palpable finiteness.
Ronni Ancona phones Rob to tell him he’s got the part of the greaseball in the mob movie and he celebrates by getting brushed off by his cuckolded wife on the phone. Serves the rat bastard right.
The verdict: The lava of a volcano shot up hot from under the sea. One thing leads to another and you made an island of me.
Marks out of 10: 7