I’ve recently made my way back through The Trip series, Michael Winterbottom’s documents of fictionalized Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon eating and improving their ways across various European countrysides. Although this time I’m finally watching the TV versions of the films, which were either not previously available in the States or I just didn’t care enough to seek them out—especially since I consider the second film in the series, The Trip to Italy, a masterpiece in need of no improvement. However, Criterion Channel put up all the films and their respective television cuts, and it’s become part of my post-work and morning rituals to revisit these sad, self-stifling (and, of course, funny) middle-aged men in their longer iterations.
The first Trip is a revelation in this format, but they start to waffle as the films themselves do. Besides having longer-running sequences of the series’ signature dueling impressions, there’s a heavier emphasis on one bit that’s often glanced over in the theatrical cuts: the bill. What might in the feature-length versions be a quick, shocked reaction from Coogan upon looking at the exorbitant price of their tasting-menu lunch becomes a discussion between him and Brydon where they try to explain away their class-based guilt around being wealthy enough to dine so well. Both had middle-class upbringings and were propelled to fortune by becoming top-tier comedians in the UK, albeit not without the caveat of a British sense of self-flagellation.
Winterbottom’s works often explore—to varying degrees of success—contradictions within society stratified by class and capital. While his 1999 film Wonderland is hit-and-miss, it’s interesting the way in which Winterbottom constantly reframes the follies of working- and middle-class individuals against the broader backdrop of London still reeling from austerity. These longer cuts of The Trip films offer Winterbottom’s most outspoken self-critiques as the characters themselves have little to do other than point out the ridiculousness of their situation, one where they struggle to find the words to be food critics, and instead wish to reveal something cultural while at the same time only experiencing culture as it is rendered for enjoyment of the upper classes.
Most interesting, as an American, is just how posh the road is for these European travelers. It’s easy to forget amidst the highway interchange McDonald’s and rest-stop Roy Rogers dotting the United States, that across the Atlantic car travel was originally something advertised for only the ultra-wealthy. Automobiles were something new for the old bourgeois, and a tire company created travel guides to only the best restaurants (the kinds Coogan and Brydon become accustomed to in The Trip series), offering Michelin stars to places that Europe’s wealthiest would like to stop in at on their journeys.
The automobile in America became a symbol of aspiration—an extension of Manifest Destiny, even—where Henry Ford got the masses to cut up their cities and run for the suburbs where every man could be a king, and Carl G. Fisher convinced these upwardly (and horizontally) mobile to interlope the frontiers with ease from east to west, north to south. The road masked itself in America as something achievable, conquerable, something anybody could hop on and, with enough gumption, make their way to the top from. In Europe, that mask never existed, and as automobiles became goods for a new European middle class, those new-money types weren’t so much the kings of the road as they were privileged enough to get to share it with the centuries-old gentry.
Part of what makes The Trip so much more interesting is the way it twists that knife into two men who narcissistically wish to be at the top, but are constantly mired by having to be themselves, never able to lose the baggage of where they came.