Overview
The Trip is a 2010 British television sitcom series and feature film directed by Michael Winterbottom, starring Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon as fictionalised versions of themselves on a restaurant tour of northern England. The series was edited into feature film format and premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival in September 2010. The full series was first broadcast on BBC Two and BBC HD in the United Kingdom in November 2010. Both the TV series and film received very positive reviews.
Three further series followed. The Trip to Italy was broadcast on BBC Two in 2014, The Trip to Spain was filmed in 2016 and broadcast on Sky Atlantic in 2017, and The Trip to Greece was filmed in 2019 and aired on Sky One in 2020. Like the first series, the second, third and fourth were each edited into feature films. Winterbottom, Coogan and Brydon stated that The Trip to Greece would be the final series for the show.
Origins
Coogan and Brydon's roles as fictionalised versions of themselves are a continuation of their improvised performances in the film A Cock and Bull Story (2005), also directed by Michael Winterbottom. In an interview with The Guardian, Coogan said he and Brydon exaggerated "the aspects of ourselves that help the comedy ... I like playing with the fact that it might be me, to give it a bit more edge. So some of the conversations with Rob are funny, but some of them are very uncomfortable. They're sort of genuine arguments. It's a sort of an exaggeration of real life."
Cast
Steve Coogan as Steve Coogan
Rob Brydon as Rob Brydon
Claire Keelan as Emma, Steve's assistant who joins each of the trips for at least a few days
Rebecca Johnson as Sally, Rob's wife
Tim Leach as Joe, Steve's son, with whom he has a distant relationship that they gradually mend throughout the series
Marta Barrio as Yolanda, a photographer who accompanies Emma, and has a casual relationship with Steve
Margo Stilley as Mischa, Steve's American girlfriend who breaks up with him in the first series
Ben Stiller appears in a cameo as himself in one of Steve’s dreams
From Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0).