Alison & Larry: Billericay to Barry review – the dullest celebrity travel show of all time

Are Gavin and Stacey co-stars Alison Steadman and Larry Lamb even friends? You can’t tell from this mind-bendingly banal failure of a series. Who is responsible for this flop?

The celebrities are everywhere: go to the ends of the earth and there you will find famous faces wryly immersing themselves in the local culture in the name of yet another TV travelogue (and enjoying a free – no wait, paid – holiday in the process). Stanley Tucci is in Italy, as are Alan Carr and Amanda Holden. Jane McDonald is cruising around the globe. Bradley Walsh, Romesh Ranganathan and Jack Whitehall have made their trips a family affair. Martin Clunes, Conan O’Brien, Fern Britton, Gordon Ramsay, Paul Merton, Zac Efron – I could go on – are all at it, too.

Granted, few are undertaking quite as humdrum a journey as that of Alison Steadman and Larry Lamb in Alison & Larry: Billericay to Barry. The pair are driving from Essex to south Wales, the twin settings of the beloved 00s sitcom Gavin and Stacey, in which they co-starred (not as the culture-clash couple in question, of course, but as Gav’s parents). That is no slight on Britain’s lovely scenery, or the ever-so-friendly people they meet during their increasingly random sightseeing stopoffs: a bird of prey centre, Marlow lock, a puppet-making workshop. Rather, the mundanity of this essentially uneventful trip is magnified by the fact that it has been stretched, wafer-thin, into three hour-long episodes. Worse, squatting at the show’s core is a sad reality: Steadman and Lamb have absolutely nothing to say to each other.

Continue reading...

from The Guardian https://ift.tt/zC4i51u

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Tadej Pogacar completes emphatic debut victory at the Giro d’Italia

Dominant Pogacar wins by biggest margin since 1965 Tim Merlier outsprints Jonathan Milan to take final stage Slovenia’s Tadej Pogacar emphatically won the Giro d’Italia on his debut when he retained his unassailable overall lead after the 21st and final stage in Rome on Sunday, winning by the biggest overall margin since 1965. The 25-year-old UAE Team Emirates rider had been in the leader’s pink jersey since winning stage two, the first of his six stage successes, and finished the ceremonial 125km flat run on Sunday safely in the bunch as Tim Merlier won the stage. Continue reading... from The Guardian https://ift.tt/fYFnoe3
Read more

Two years after Buffalo mass shooting, an art exhibit focuses on the victims

A few months after 14 May 2022, a curator sought out three local artists. The resulting exhibition, Before and After Again, is thought to be the first of its kind Two years ago, a white supremacist drove 200 miles to Buffalo, New York, and opened fire in a grocery store in the city’s predominantly Black East Side neighborhood, killing 10 people and injuring three. Though the Tops Friendly Markets where the racist mass shooting took place has been remodeled, and most of the country has forgotten about the violence that occurred on 14 May 2022, Buffalo’s East Side is forever changed. Continue reading... from The Guardian https://ift.tt/mqu1LFv
Read more

£1 Thursdays review – nightclubbing, sex talk and big decisions

Finborough theatre, London A mix of sweet observations about female friendship and cheeky brazenness about sex, Kat Rose-Martin’s play finds two young women at a crossroads in their lives In the cold air outside a sticky nightclub in Bradford, 17-year-olds Stacey and Jen are at a crossroads. In one direction lies the world they know: the family stress, the looming exams, the pumping pop beats at the club where they’ll reliably pull boys from school. In the other direction lies an uncertain path, and questions of who they are apart from one another, whether they could be the first in their families to go to university, and how to afford it if they do. Constantly on their minds, while they’re drunkenly dancing the nights away, is where they’ll end up, and what to do if they are the ones left behind. Thoughtful if not revelatory, £1 Thursdays covers an uneasy period of big decisions in these characters’ lives, as the gap between them widens. Monique Ashe-Palmer (Six) is ebullient as St
Read more