The Wheels on the Bus Go Round and Round . . (Coach Trip)

Member Name: dkm1981

Product:	Coach Trip
Date:	04/06/09 (113 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: The places they visit, the tour guide

Disadvantages: The new Brits on Tour route it seems to have taken

Coach Trip is a Channel Four programme that was first shown in 2005. It gained a cult following (probably from the student masses!) and is now running it's third series on weekday teatimes on Channel Four (with repeats of the whole weeks' episodes on saturday afternoons, again, on Channel Four).

The idea of the programme is that seven couples board a coach to travel around Europe under the guidance of their tour guide, the incomparable Brendan Sheerin (shown in the picture above). At the end of each day, the couples all vote to eliminate someone from the trip. The person with the most votes gets a yellow card. If this happens a second time, that couple gets a red card and they are asked to leave the party.

Each time a couple leaves, they are replaced by another couple, until they get to the end of the thirty-day trip when the final vote is for the winner, not for elimination. The winning couple's prize is an extended trip in the final destination.

Coach Trip follows many programmes before it, along the same vein, whereby the pretext of the programmme (in this case travelling around Europe) is lost amongst the need to keep the viewing public entertained by showing countless arguments and run-ins between the deliberately different contestents.

Like Wife Swap, Big Brother, Come Dine With Me and the rest (interestingly, all shown on Channel Four), what started out as a fairly interesting programme, with a theme and a minor social behavioural experiment has turned into a free-for-all where you spend thirty minutes a day watching people fall in and out of love in a fashion that would make Jeremy Kyle proud. In the first series, you got to see a bit of the beautiful places they visited and to learn a bit of the history of the places. Now, you just see a group of 'Brits On Tour' that make you alternate between cringing and disgusted.

Another criticism I have is the need to spend half the programme telling us what is coming up or what has already happened (usually before and after the break and at the beginning and end of the show). Now I can just about accept this kind of format for programmes that are only shown once a week, when you do have time to forget things. But how stupid do these people think I am, that I'll have forgotten what happened before the break? Give me some credit please! I can't help thinking that it's just laziness on their part - they can't be bothered to make a full half-hour programme, so they simply re-hash what has happened and what will happen, until you just can't take anymore!

In a programme that has changed it's style so much - even controversially replacing the old narrator Andy Love, with the new and unfamiliar David Quantick - the only saving grace is the persistance of Brendan the tour guide. He is almost a mother to the group (who seem to lose all notions of common sense when travelling abroad), catering to their every whim and offering advice and assistance where needed. He's no push-over though and can often be seen giving his own personal views of the contestants and their behaviour to the camera.

In conclusion, I'd have to say that this has, like all good things do, come to an end. Unfortunately Channel Four don't seem to have realised and will, no doubt, continue to wring every last penny out of the show, for years to come.

Summary: Come on C4, quit whilst you are (just about) ahead!