It is most definitely a trip.
Coach Trip is a British reality television show where a load of people in teams of two take a coach tour around Europe and do their best not to get voted off by their fellow contestants.
That’s all I know going into this experience and I’m excited. Is there a toilet on the coach? Do they stop for snacks? Are there typical reality television occurrences such as tactical voting and backstabbing going on? I’ll find out today, even if it kills me.
Here are six things I learned from watching Coach Trip.
1. Nobody knows how to distribute name badges anymore
Rather than logically giving the couples name badges, the only person wearing a name badge is the most identifiable person on the coach, Brendan. He’s the tour guide, his name should be the easiest to remember. Coach Trip has been on the telly since 2005 and the only thing that’s remained a constant is the tour guide. For 12 years, viewers have been tuning in to see Brendan’s excitable little face sat at the top of the bus, presumably informing the travellers that the air conditioning will cool down once the bus starts moving and to put their rubbish in the bins provided.
Why not give the contestants name badges? Respectfully, who is in charge here? I’ve been watching the show for two minutes at this point and I’m pretty sure that Brendan’s name is the one that I’m going to need to know the least. I’m a busy girl, I’ve got dank memes to make and celebrities to beg for retweets. I don’t have time in my day to pause and replay segments of this television show to catch peoples’ names so that I can slag them accurately on the internet. Please give them all name badges, Coach Trip. I beg you. It’s too late for me, but others still have time to be helped.
2. That’s not a coach, it’s a fucking bus
Admittedly, I’m not a mass transportation expert, but that looks like a very small coach to me. There’s a total of sixteen seats, then the bus driver is directly behind Brendan (whose name we learned thanks to a name tag). That’s a large amount of unaccounted space that either isn’t there, or is being used for some mysterious (probably television production) reason. The average coach has 56 seats, so there’s 40 chairs amiss here.
Granted the tables take up a total of two seat spaces each, that brings this “coach” capacity up 24 seats. Where is the rest of the coach? If the black panel we’re seeing at the back is the genuine end of the coach, then we need to face facts that the show should be called ‘Bus Trip’. It’s not as catchy a title, but at least it’s honest. I don’t know how the producers, participants and particularly Brendan sleep at night. They’re spreading lies around mainland Europe and I’ll never forgive them for that.
3. Tequila, limes & tan lines
Tequila. limes. & tan lines. Ya know? Life isn’t about the journey or the destination. It’s about a regionally specific distilled beverage made from the blue agave plant, a hybrid citrus fruit and a visually clear division on the human skin between an area of pronounced paleness relative to other areas that have been suntanned by exposure to ultraviolet radiation. If we don’t have tequila, nor limes, nor tan lines, do we really have anything at all? Thank you, Coach Trip, for reminding us all of what truly matters.
4. The voting process is televisual perfection
From what I can gather, the coach trippers assemble in a camera-friendly semicircle midway through each episode and openly state who they would like to leave the bus. It’s absolute savagery, with everyone accusing each other of playing games, backstabbing and being snakes. It’s hard not to admit that everything about this is perfection. They’re openly insulting each other under the disguise of being forced to do it for the show. The reality is, they’re thriving off this brutality and it’s a glimpse into what society will one day descend into when a reality television host is made leader of the free world. Oh wait.
The backdrop in this particular episode is the beautifully scenic area of Split in Croatia. Annoyingly, not one of the couples had the presence of mind to throw in a jazzy little pun about how they’d like to SPLIT a couple up, or something equally cringe. Instead, it was claws out as we heard who’s been wronging whom over the past couple of episodes. At the end of the day, it’s a free holiday on board an abnormally small coach, of course tensions are going to build. The release is sufficiently catty.
6. Brendan keeps his name badge on when he’s WEARING A DRESSING GOWN
Some dramatics occurred right after some other dramatics occurred and unfortunately I can’t recall to whom these dramatics happened to because I do not know any of their names due to an aforementioned poor dispensation of name badges. Two girls called to Brendan’s room, at which point it was made public knowledge that a) Brendan sees fit to wear a dressing gown in such a warm climate as Croatia, and b) Brendan wears his name tag to bed, just in case he encounters some unknown folk in his dreams presumably.
Before today, I didn’t know that the coach is actually a fucking bus, I didn’t know that ‘tequila, limes & tan lines’, I didn’t know that the most beautiful form of savagery occurs during the voting portion of Coach Trip and I certainly didn’t know that Brendan from Coach Trip wore a name badge at all times despite his coach trippers going without. The world is a beautiful place and if we simply open our eyes to its beauty every now and then, we might just learn something 🙂
Images via Channel 4
