Neil and Martin's Bon Voyage, review: it's a shame these men are no longer behaving badly

Telegraph

25-03-2025

When you've made your name as a duo in a TV show called Men Behaving Badly, a new series based around getting the boys back together calls for some tomfoolery.
It's pretty much the only reason, surely, that anyone would tune in to Neil and Martin's Bon Voyage (U&Gold), a three-parter that sees Neil Morrissey take his friend and Men Behaving Badly co-star Martin Clunes on an adventure through some of southern France's most beautiful regions.
In other words, another celebrity travel-jolly along a fairly well-trodden path of the sort that I'm always surprised people don't find more irksome in these straitened times. At the very least, if Neil and Martin are going to have an exceedingly bon voyage on someone else's dollar, let's have some proper bad-boy antics. Let's have some drunken twerking, some drinking of spittoons at poncey vineyards and ideally a surprise visit from a disapproving Leslie Ash and a frankly livid Caroline Quentin.
But no. Neil and Martin's Bon Voyage was simply another celebrity travel jolly that made you wonder, 'Do I actually pay for this stuff or does it come bundled free with my Sky sub?' As far as one could tell, Morrissey and Clunes do like one another and their old-bro badinage wasn't forced. Then again, they are professional actors, and for Bon Voyage to work some functional old-bro badinage was non-negotiable. So yes, there was innuendo, there were dad jokes, there were 'things you can't say anymore'. Clunes, we should add, has done this kind of celebrity travelogue a lot and as such knows exactly what is required.
The best bits were the 'voyage': the pair's various destinations were pretty standard TV travelogue fare – canoeing on the Dordogne, drinking in Bordeaux, eating when they weren't drinking or canoeing – but it was when they were on the road that Clunes and Morrissey's conversation took some intriguing turns.
They talked about how they had met 40 years ago on a production of Peter Pan; about how Morrissey had once nicked a role off Hugh Grant; they talked about how Morrissey had been in care from the age of eight while Clunes had been at boarding school ('All those teachers hitting you with sticks, it was like a queue of people being nasty to you.') Personally, I found this significantly more diverting than the drinking, the dancing and the silly hats.
But then no silly hats, no men behaving badly, and without that, no real point to Bon Voyage at all. On balance, there was just enough of South-Western France and just enough evocation of a genuine friendship to ease you through what was otherwise a well-worn route.