Is there life after Top Gear for its presenters? Freddie Flintoff, whose life-changing accident led to the BBC’s flagship car show being “rested for the foreseeable future”, proved that there was with his brilliant and moving sequel to Freddie Flintoff’s Field of Dreams. Alas, no such luck with co-presenters Paddy McGuinness and Chris Harris’s new BBC project, Paddy and Chris: Road Tripping.
If the title of their new series suggested something like the original Top Gear trio’s other programme, The Grand Tour, then car fans will have been bitterly disappointed. This was a road trip alright, but with little interest in cars as McGuinness and Harris visited various European countries in search of the secret of a healthy and happy long life. “We’ve decided to tackle getting older head on,” as McGuinness put it (a rather unfortunate turn of phrase given Top Gear’s record of accidents).
McGuinness had recently turned 50, while Harris was a year short of this milestone, but is still seemed like a weak excuse for sending them on the road. A lazily contrived job creation scheme, more like.
Anyway, their first stop was Sweden, “home of flatpack furniture and Abba” – a taster of the upcoming shallow dive into the Scandinavian psyche. They began by joining a bunch of naked (but suitably pixellated) male Swedish pensioners in a sauna, before a forest workout with a triathlete called Jonas that involved chopping down trees and throwing rocks. So much nicer than exercising in the gym, they both agreed.
Then it all became a bit Rob and Romesh vs… (the Sky series in which Rob Beckett and Romesh Ranganathan try activities way beyond their skill set) as the pair joined in a game of ice-hockey with some professional players. They also trespassed on Travel Man terrain by riding on a big dipper in a Gothenburg amusement park (“having fun boosts your immune system” was their excuse). In fact, the programme was such a medley of other travelogues that by the time they got to eat some seaweed, I wouldn’t have been surprised if Joanna Lumley had joined them.
The only time either presenter felt properly engaged was when Harris started enthusing over the 23-year-old Volvo V70 that they were driving around in. Having admired the car’s “nicely spaced pedal box” and “five-cylinder warble”, Harris was immediately shut down by McGuinness. “You’ve got to stop doing that on this trip… we’ve got a different set of viewers.” Have they really? I predict a sizeable overlap in the Venn diagram illustrating shared viewer demographics with Top Gear – to start with at least, as committed petrolheads may not stay the distance.
With all their musings on ageing and assurances that they were having a great time, I was forcibly reminded of the superior Mortimer and Whitehouse: Gone Fishing. But there’s a reason why pairs of comedians dominate this type of programme – they spark off each other. McGuinness (a comedian) and Harris (not a comedian) did make each other laugh with their lads-on-tour bants – the difference between the words “arse” and “anus” received much discussion – but their on-screen hysterics didn’t make me laugh.
The seeming obsession with intimate body parts continued with McGuinness, showering with the professional ice-hockey players, claiming he’d “never seen as much penis as I have in Sweden”. Harris meanwhile opined that “I can’t believe I’ve gone from test-driving Lamborghinis to sharing a shower with McGuinness”. He wasn’t alone there.
‘Paddy and Chris: Road Tripping’ continues next Sunday at 8pm on BBC One
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