Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon have gone all existential in The Trip to Greece. But they’re far from the only British comics riffing on the brevity of our existence Over the past decade, The Trip has established itself as one of the most upbeat and undemanding shows on television, and the fourth season only continues the theme: murder, rotting corpses and the casting of heroes’ souls into Hades all feature within the first 10 seconds, as Rob Brydon recites a line from Homer’s Iliad. A couple of minutes later, he and Steve Coogan are sitting down for a slap-up lunch and the old bickering begins, the latter claiming he’s getting more attractive as he gets older with the overly insistent tone of a man who is protesting too much. As the pair travel retrace Odysseus’s mythical voyage to Ithaca in The Trip to Greece – the journey’s grandeur showing up our heroes’ pasty knees and strained map-reading – their conversation covers all the usual bases: music, movies, petty showbiz hang-ups. But it also covers some less usual ones, too: the scattering of ashes, potential suicide methods, the fleeting nature of life, possible final words. The tone might be frivolous, but listen closely and the subject matter starts to sound deceptively grave. The Trip has always been about the portents of middle age, yet it has always been careful to keep the D-word at arm’s length. As the fourth series goes on, though, an unmistakable theme emerges – and by the end, death has stepped emphatically out of the shadows. Continue reading...
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