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.
It isn’t the only recent hit series to centre around a pair of craggy comics hanging out and shooting the breeze while something unspeakable lurks in the distance. Mortimer & Whitehouse: Gone Fishing has drummed up an equally adoring cult following via much the same template, and in that instance mortality looms even larger: it is premised on the fact that both stars are in need of a sedate hobby in the wake of near-fatal heart problems.
Both The Trip and Gone Fishing are something weighty disguised as something light: semi-unscripted riffs on life’s minutiae, but with a quiet undertone of existential resignation. On stage, Jordan Brookes took last summer’s Edinburgh comedy award for a standup show that fits much the same description. Even Ricky Gervais has taken a turn for the metaphysical with his recent sitcom After Life, about a bereaved loser on the brink of ending it all.
This is a bit of a departure for British comedy, which has tended to fare best when concentrating on low-level despair rather than life’s big questions: banality rather than mortality, the everyday rather than the end of days. It’s not that the antics of David Brent and Alan Partridge didn’t offer some profound insights into the human condition, just that they did so in their own, agonisingly mundane way. To see their creators openly grappling with the fragility of existence is undeniably odd.
However, it is increasingly fashionable. Look beyond Britain and you will see that this sort of angsty philosophising has become something of a TV trend. BoJack Horseman, The Good Place and Rick and Morty – as well as the one-season gem Forever – are all unabashed meditations on mortality, and all count among the last decade’s most intensely loved shows.
Of course, it’s not exactly novel for a comedy to enlist the grim reaper for a bit of thematic heft – Six Feet Under and Breaking Bad both cemented their prestige status with the inky-black humour that only death can bring. But what unites this current crop is the lightness with which the topic is approached. Rather than placing it front and centre as a statement of intent, these shows smuggle it in under the veil of sunny colour palettes, fart gags and – on this side of the Atlantic – freeform schoolboy chatter. All of these shows represent a marked step away from the solemnness and gloom of golden-era TV – and yet, at heart, they are all ultra-candid reflections on the most solemn and gloomy topic of them all.
The difference on this side of the pond is that the shows are not being made by hot young pretenders but by the elder statesmen of comedy. People for whom the subject strikes a far more urgent note – and a more poignant one, too. Mortimer and Whitehouse might give the impression they could babble for ever, and Gervais’s presence can sometimes seem incessant, but the ultimate message of their latest work is that time waits for no man.
Man being the operative word. If Brydon and Coogan (or their screen personas) are indeed taking the frontline in a generation’s last stand, perhaps it is fitting that they are doing it while zooming along the coast in a jeep, gorging on high-end food and lightly badgering the twentysomething waitresses who serve it to them. As popular culture – and comedy in particular – is waking up to the historical predominance of the white male voice and starting to redress the balance, is it simply coincidence these middle-aged men have been struck by a sudden urge to contemplate their own demise?
In truth: probably. But either way, it is a canny way of staving off extinction. Or as Brydon says over a plate of grilled calamari: “This journey of life is all too brief. Why not enjoy it?” It’s as good a reason as any to give up another three hours to his company.
The Trip to Greece is on Sky One and Now TV from 3 March. After Life returns to Netflix in April
