Victoria Jelinek

Steve Coogan has been asked by The Observer of London to review six of the finest restaurants in Northern England. He plans to take his pretend girlfriend Mischa, but after she backs out he is forced, with demonstratable reluctance, to take his best friend and source of eternal aggravation, Rob Brydon.

The Trip was a six-part BBC2 series last fall, and almost everything – the title, premise, the duelling funnymen (also from Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story, an earlier film of Michael Winterbottom’s) are the same except for the abbreviated length for the movie and some gags consequently lost in the process of shortening. In between the food, the vocal caricatures and Lake District landscapes, the duo goad each other with smiling insults and prickly jokes, all the while comparing their successes. Sometimes the camaraderie edges into aggression but this is soon stifled by laughter and good humour; lots of tears and laughs.