James Walton

Looks lovely if nothing else: Craig and Bruno’s Great British Road Trips reviewed

Plus: BBC Three's Secrets of an Isis Smartphone included a video of a British jihadi doing a passable impersonation of David Attenborough

Bruno Tonioli and Craig Revel Horwood with the sea-shanty group, Fisherman's Friends, at Porthcurno. Image: (C) RDF Television 
issue 17 July 2021

To its huge credit, ITV has managed to find perhaps the last two television celebrities who’ve never before been filmed travelling around Britain while exchanging light banter and using the word ‘iconic’ a lot. In Craig and Bruno’s Great British Road Trips, the Strictly judges are driving a Union flag-bedecked Mini through such telegenic staples of heart-warming TV dramas as the Lake District, the Yorkshire Dales and the Scottish Highlands.

For the opening episode, the choice fell on the Cornish coast, which certainly helped the programme achieve its primary aim of looking lovely. But this, as it transpired, was just as well — because for a fair amount of the time, not much else happened. In Newquay, the pair donned Top Gun shades and joined a crab fisherman on his boat. Unfortunately, as the waters were a little choppy, they weren’t allowed to do anything beyond noting how annoying it must be to be a crab, having to ‘do chassés all your life’.

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