It was not possible to see Panorama’s Trump: The Kremlin Candidate? (BBC1) in advance, but adequately placed to offer insight into the decline of the western world instead was Coach Trip: Road to Marbs (E4), in which 14 contestants go on holiday together on a bus, then each day have to decide who is the least popular couple and vote those people off, right in front of their sad, disappointed faces.
I had not realised that Coach Trip was still on. When it started back in 2005, it was a late-afternoon treat that featured people who might actually choose to go on a coach trip abroad. It quickly became a student viewing staple, largely because of its host and compere, Brendan Sheerin, who embodied end-of-the-pier camp and gentle bawdiness, but also because it pioneered a kind of television that revelled in forcing uptight Brits to be rude to each other’s faces, rather than behind each other’s backs. It’s a formula that has since been put to excellent use on Come Dine With Me and Four in a Bed. It was mean, but not too mean. It was designed to create awkwardness, but it never ascended to Big Brother levels of cruel.
But here it is, 12 years later, on the second series of its “reboot” (the first, in 2016, took the Road to Ibiza), and now there’s a hashtag emblazoned on the roof of the coach. Gone are the retired couples in fleeces and walking boots, replaced with a homogenous army of magazine-attractive, sculpted young people and a series of activities that appear to mostly involve getting them to wear as little clothing as possible.
This Coach Trip takes place around sunny Spain, with plenty of opportunities for those lingering bikinis-and-boxers shots. The contestants arrive in pairs; there’s one couple, the rest are friends, then two individuals turn up. They’re all in their 20s. Some are seasoned travellers, and some are new to the joys of sitting on a bus for 15 hours when there’s only one loo, the air conditioning has broken and someone has packed an egg mayo and tuna sandwich. They all love a laugh. Kieran and Sam talk as if David Brent alone taught them how to be men. Calvin and Conrad describe themselves collectively as “the king of banter”. Their banter is so great that it has merged them into one regal entity., their coat of arms surely bearing the legend, “We’re only having a laugh.” Dhillan and Adam are best friends who take offence easily, which bodes well for the end-of-episode vote. Most of the others merge into a series of nice faces.
Apart from, that is, the two lone travellers, who are quickly sandwiched together in an attempt at adding a little Take Me Out/First Dates romance. There’s Olivia, who appeared on series five of Made In Chelsea (she has moved on “to bigger and better things”, she says), and another Adam, an Aussie and self-declared “ladies man” who immediately decides he’s supposed to fancy Olivia and treats her as a challenge to be tackled. “What would annoy you about her?” he is asked. “If she said no,” he blurts, less lucky lothario, more potential recipient of a restraining order. Adam is as charmless as this reboot, but he does provide one of the more memorable lines of the episode, when Olivia pulls him up on calling her “chick”. “Oh right, yeah,” he apologises, smoothly explaining that she didn’t understand him. “We call birds ‘chicks’.”
Where old Coach Trip contestants might have visited a museum or learned about the local geography, this lot “get to know each other” – the currency by which they make enough friends to avoid being booted off – by pole-dancing and going on a waterslide. Then comes the vote, which remains a masterclass in British passive-aggressive avoidance. “Nothing personal,” one couple will say. “We just got to know the others better.” “It’s fine. We’ve all got to do it,” their victims will reply, through tight white teeth. As the excuses get increasingly preposterous – one vote is based on where they are seated on the bus – the resentment is more and more palpable. In the interests of not rocking the bus for the following day’s exile, however, everyone is forced to push it down, and grimace gamely.
Brendan is taking it all in his stride, but there’s something of the cut-and-shut about this incarnation of Coach Trip, something not right in the sandwiching together of old-style TV and its more youth-focused offspring. It’s like The Only Way is Antiques Roadshow, or Songs of Praise: Grime Edition. These people wouldn’t go anywhere near a coach holiday. They just want to be on TV. And that’s fine, but it strips the premise of its bumbling appeal, and makes it exactly the same as any other reality show. It’s a shame that not even Brendan’s variety-show cheer can save it.
