Simply put, Coach Trip was Come Dine With Me in confined spaces. This extreme proximity meant that airs and graces could not be maintained past day three: sooner or later, everything came out. The pair dynamics made it: the idea of watching two people testing their internal dynamic to the limits while also integrating into an external one was the thrill. Big Brother had got it wrong; it was pre-existing intimate relationships – how couples, friends, develop their own internal language – that was the real fascination.
Add to that it was a classic of the class tourism genre. Pensioners from Dorset having to bus about abroad with hideous, posh, pink-cheeked Libertines fans in pork-pie hats. Carnivores from Barnsley getting up the nose of snobby Clapham vegans. Couples who woke up to the fact that one of them was wildly unpopular was always a particularly tart realisation. As was the middle-aged behaving spitefully or childishly towards the young – so unseemly you almost never see it in real life. The torture of being put back on the bus with the same people who’d just voted you a yellow card, ie one step from eviction, is expressly forbidden in the Geneva Convention. Channel 4 didn’t give a hoot.
Coach Trip lasted a generous 12 seasons and a celebrity version but, just like Come Dine With Me, there was no obvious reason why it should ever run out of steam, unless humanity suddenly lost its capacity to sneer at spoilt teens and boorish welders. Then the yoofs came for it. The show was traded out to E4, and where once there had been Britain’s rich tapestry, now there were a series of airbag trapezoids and slippery deltoids. Now, we have Coach Trip: Road to Ibiza. Then Road to Marbs. Then Road to Tenerife. Amber, Matt, Danny, Sam, Jordan, Chloe, Aaron, Abi: these are all the names that the characters would be getting from here on in.
Rather than pack them off to cathedrals and art museums – which would have been funny – the dimwits are normally sent on a series of adventure-sports challenges. Parasailing. Hovercrafting. Mechanical bull riding. Each underlined with euphoric drum’n’bass, or that loungey house that E4 buys by the yard. Oh my days, it’s like, well good.
Meanwhile, the only stable character, Brendan, suffers from Flandersisation. Once a coach driver who happens-to-be-gay, in the Ibiza era he is a camp siren blaring. Every time he sees a cylindrical object he has to think of a synonym for John Thomas. Every time he sees a bag of mincemeat he has to do at least 12 minutes of repartee about mincing with one of the mince-brains. For one activity, there’s a caricature competition. One strapping knucklehead, told to draw a caricature, draws his female subject topless. Poor Brendan is now reduced to the role of primary school teacher confiscating the jizzing-cock pictures from his lowest-set pupils. He has lived too long. You can see him wishing for his very own red card. Perhaps setting a challenge of alpine brake-tampering would have been a greater act of mercy.
