Age as allegory

Sky Atlantic — available only to Sky customers — has the cunning/infuriating policy of broadcasting the kind of programmes most likely to appeal to people who pride themselves on not being Sky customers. (Basically, the liberal, metropolitan you-know-what.) Now, to a list that includes Veep, Curb Your Enthusiasm, Girls and Last Week Tonight with John Oliver, we can add The Trip, whose third series Sky has poached from the BBC.

Like the first two — set in the Lake District and Italy — The Trip to Spain (Thursday) is directed by Michael Winterbottom and features Rob Brydon and Steve Coogan playing versions of themselves that feel teasingly close to the truth. Brydon is a mostly contented husband and father; Coogan, an anxious autodidact, alternately boasting and fretting about his status in Hollywood.

Once again, the two drive about through lovely scenery, eat at lovely restaurants, prod away at each other’s insecurities and constantly try to top each other’s impersonations — all while just about staying friends. Once again too, they do this with such brilliant and seemingly effortless naturalism that you can sometimes forget how odd the programme is: defiantly slow-paced, bristling with literary references, and blending its comedy with a full-scale meditation on male ageing sharp enough to have earned it some serious scholarly attention. ‘The Trip,’ one critic has written, ‘is more than just an emphatic, self-consciously neo-realist, neo-baroque allegory’ — which is not something you can imagine being said about Mrs Brown’s Boys.

In fact, in the first series since both men turned 50, the theme of age is even more prominent. Without making a great fuss about it, Thursday’s episode forensically laid out several symptoms of fiftysomething male life — starting with Brydon and Coogan’s reliance on a guide book rather than a phone.