To Italy, for the first episode of Paul Hollywood’s Big Continental Road Trip (28 May, 9pm, BBC2), in which television’s much panted-over master baker gets to cruise around sun-dappled countries in all his spray-tanned splendour.
If you thought that Bake Off’s king of the cream horn had only one string to his bow, this new series – essentially Top Gear minus the bantz and budget – is determined to set you straight. This will, the BBC hopes, be the ultimate marriage of personality and machinery, of gunmetal hair and hot bodywork, of smouldering eyes and … oh, you get the picture.
Each week finds Hollywood embarking on a road trip across a European nation with a proud motoring history. It’s a conceit that apparently precludes him from crawling up the M1 in an Austin Allegro and stopping at Trowell services for a Greggs. A missed opportunity if ever there was one. Instead our host, who races cars in his spare time and spends his evenings in his garage whispering sweet nothings to his Aston Martin, meets minor celebrities and car experts, drives assorted sports cars and stares slack-jawed at people speaking Italian.
First, we’re off to Rome to learn why Italians make cars the way they do, and to watch Hollywood and his passenger Bruno Tonioli – of Strictly fame – bunny-hop across Piazza Venezia in a tangerine Lamborghini, fighting a losing battle with fellow motorists who effortlessly cut them up. Next, having ditched Bruno, he goes to Maranello, home of the Ferrari – where he gets a faraway look in his eyes as he calculates whether his Channel 4 Bake Off deal will stretch to a new motor – and then Verona, Turin, Courmayeur and, finally, Ivrea.
There are instructive historical snippets about car manufacturing, and lots of wanging on about the Italian psyche: they shout! They gesticulate! They’re stylish! Who knew? We meet the Italian chef and lifestyle journalist Eleonora Galasso in Turin. She seems to know a lot about cars and is the proud owner of a Fiat Cinquecento but that doesn’t stop Hollywood from mansplaining her car’s design triumphs and leaning in for a kiss where a handshake would suffice.
Elsewhere, we watch the residents of Ivrea pelt each other with oranges (the motoring connection is never properly explained), and Hollywood gets hot and sweaty behind the wheels of increasingly absurd supercars, the last of which is so close to the ground that he is reduced to eyeballing the crotches of passing pedestrians.
Hollywood isn’t the sharpest knife in the drawer and, in his padded jacket and bootcut jeans, he’s no Gregory Peck from Roman Holiday either. Even so, he’s a new man here – a result, no doubt, of not having to chew on a collapsing battenberg in a leaky tent on a British country estate. Zipping around Italian backstreets, he has the look of a lifer on day release, dialling down the machismo and shaking off the icily superior Bake Off persona. The all-new Paul is about self-deprecating one-liners and wide-eyed wonder. Driving past the Colosseum in Rome, he gurgles cheerily: “I love that building. You just think ‘Russell Crowe.’” Oh Paul, you big dolt. Paul Hollywood’s Big Continental Road Trip is pretty as a picture but there’s not a lot going on under the bonnet.
