Stanley Tucci is sifting rice in an antique Italian mill near Verona. Tony Shalhoub is weeding wheat fields in Japan. Conan O’Brien is cosplaying a Viking in Norway. And Eugene Levy is kind of regretting he left home.
All aboard for the celebrity travel experience, although it’s a good idea to be careful which tour you choose, because some are more rewarding than others.
There’s a sizeable catalogue of performers – frequently actors and comedians, many of them Brits – who’ve parked their day jobs and taken the role of TV travel guides. Michael Palin and Billy Connolly were engaging early adopters, followed by Joanna Lumley and Martin Clunes. Chef Anthony Bourdain brought his maverick style to food-focused excursions; Ewan McGregor and Charley Boorman rode motorcycles across continents; Miriam Margolyes explored Australia in a campervan.
For producers, celebrity hosts provide potentially marketable names above the title. For viewers, these tours can offer experiences flavoured by the personality of the presenter. The best hosts have an infectious energy and a genuine curiosity about (and appreciation for) the places they visit and the people they meet. Because who wants a blasé travel companion?
In recent years, a new crop of hosts has been roaming the globe. Here’s a guide to some of them, listed from best to, well, maybe look elsewhere.
Tucci in Italy
It started with a drink. During the pandemic, Stanley Tucci’s negroni-mixing video went viral, the award-winning actor charming people with his unfussy assurance and urbanity. Since then, his passion for food and drink has blossomed from a happy side-hustle into a mini-industry incorporating books, cookware and TV series combining travel in Italy with a culinary focus.
First came Stanley Tucci: Searching for Italy (2021-22), which eventually ran here on SBS and Foxtel. Now there’s Tucci in Italy, which is more interested in the technical side of food production but equally scenic. There’s a palpable love of process, a pleasure in charting how Veneto became a region renowned for radicchio and why the once-impoverished Puglia has grown into the country’s celebrated breadbasket. With a mellow voice and a twinkle in his eye, Tucci is an ideal travel companion: erudite, amiable and knowledgeable. Helpfully, he also speaks the language, making interactions with farmers, manufacturers and chefs flow easily. As he often remarks after a tasting a dish whose ingredients and preparation he’s admiringly documented, “It’s very buono.” SBS, Thursday, 7.35pm, SBS On Demand and Disney+
Breaking Bread With Tony Shalhoub
While sampling rye and pumpernickel loaves from a famed Manhattan bakery, Lin-Manuel Miranda chuckles with incredulity to his actor friend, “I don’t know how you convinced people to make this a show, that we just get to eat delicious bread.” It’s a reasonable observation and his host modestly responds, “Like I’ve been saying for 40-odd years, ‘Fooled them again.’”
Well, yes and no. That’s unduly humble because Emmy winner Tony Shalhoub clearly has the goods. He’s probably best known on TV for playing Midge Maisel’s loving, fussy dad on The Marvellous Mrs Maisel and the obsessive-compulsive detective in Monk.
In this six-part series, he’s relishing various combinations of flour and water. But as his guest succinctly notes of the production’s underlying philosophy, “We’re talking about bread and bagels, but what we’re really talking about is culture and what we pass on.”
Shalhoub’s approach is akin to Tucci’s, relating food to history, customs and the capacity to bring people together. And like Tucci, he’s interested in the fusion of tradition and innovation. He has a fine time sampling pizza in New Jersey, learning about kaizen in Japan and eating “dirty bread” in Sao Paolo. A joyful exploration of his love of baked goods, this is not a show recommended for those keen to cut carbs. SBS On Demand
Travel Guides
While the other series listed here bank on presenters as drawcards, this is the anti-celebrity alternative. Here regular folk, the Average Joe and Joanne, visit places likely to pique viewers’ interest. It’s like a Gogglebox variation that sees the participants getting off the couch and hitting the road. Typically, the mix of guides includes a trio of mates up for a good time; Insta-ready BFFs; a gay couple; a family; and a mature-aged couple. They’re all primed for the challenge of heading to mystery locations and mostly enthusiastic about what they encounter because this is an enterprise that values its sponsors and aims to showcase places in the best possible light. Narrated by Denise Scott with a strong Aussie inflection, the show has true-blue tone and a lively spirit. 9Now*
Eugene Levy: The Reluctant Traveller
As an actor with a gift for comedy, Eugene Levy has been a delight for decades, particularly in Christopher Guest’s mockumentaries (Waiting For Guffman, Best in Show, A Mighty Wind) and as a key contributor to the acclaimed Schitt’s Creek. But in this role, he’s not so wonderful. As the title announces, he’s not an enthusiastic traveller. Not really keen to explore, he doesn’t like heat, cold or being in water and he’s happy at home. So why he’d be tapped to front a travel show, except from some notion of novelty or plain perversity, remains a mystery.
But the offer propelled him out of the house and for three seasons he’s tentatively explored the big wide world and done it in high style, experiencing the ride in a fashion most mere mortals could only dream about: luxuriating in a hotel-palace in Venice; touring Windsor Castle with Prince William; visiting a Maldives resort where he’s the recipient of “Olympic-style pampering” in a 3000-square-foot villa with an expansive ocean view and a private infinity pool.
Watching him apprehensively enduring this VIP treatment feels like taking a long-awaited trip saddled with a dyspeptic uncle and feeling only relief when he grudgingly concedes that it’s better than he expected. The whole production just makes me feel crabby that one of the biggest companies in the world isn’t bankrolling my bucket list. Apple TV
Conan O’Brien Must Go
The gangly comedy writer, former Tonight show host and current podcaster with the conspicuous ginger pompadour presents a not-especially-likeable impression of an American abroad. The premise of the show is that O’Brien drops in on people who’ve called into his podcast and, over three seasons, he’s covered a lot of ground, from Argentina, New Zealand and Ireland to the Netherlands and Morocco.
He’s always ready to play the clown, dressing up in funny hats and period costumes as he pretends to learn about a place. His humour is fast and sharp and some of it, thankfully, is directed at himself. The introduction to episodes, read by German filmmaker Werner Herzog, describes the host, among other putdowns, as a being “fuelled by a bottomless hunger for recognition and the occasional selfie”. It’s all deliberately off-beat and provocative.
But while the contrived wackiness minimally assists in elevating the undertaking from being an entirely hollow vanity project, O’Brien’s basically using the world as a backdrop for his antics. It gets old, fast. Binge, Foxtel
*9Now is owned by the publisher of this masthead.
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