trip hazard rosie jones review

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Rosie Jones’ Trip Hazard: rainy, grey – and perfect British holiday TV

The comedian and her guests take messy, chaotic and silly journeys into the slight rubbishness of UK holidays. It’s exactly the fun-packed approach you need for this kind of travel show

I t is a tough time for the TV travel show. It feels like a relic of a distant age, like Babycham or job security. For starters, the role of the travelogue has changed. In the evolving cultural climate, we have started to accept that simply pointing and staring at other countries and their inhabitants is no longer good enough. Throughout the era of cheap flights, when it was possible to nab a £20 seat on a plane to Pisa for the weekend to see the leaning tower, there was less call for an unqualified famous person to appear on our screens and explain why it was wonky. And let’s not even get started on the climate and the environmental impact of long-distance travel. You can see why it might be getting harder for the travelogue to thrive.

There are plenty of series trying to find a workaround, from many different angles. There’s the grand, trad adventurer, crossing continents on foot while properly engaging with geopolitical issues. There’s the ultra-local, slowburn BBC Four-type of series, in which a presenter goes for a lovely stroll, or a swim, or sails a barge, and chats to the camera about their lovely thoughts and lovely feelings. And then there’s the comedian-led approach, which mostly treats the holiday as a washing line on which to peg its sun-warmed jokes. The destination is fine, a source of passing interest, but it will never really be the star.

Rosie Jones’ Trip Hazard (23 August, 10pm, Channel 4) is in that last camp, though very much without the sun. The comedian and “national liability” visits various British destinations within a reasonable budget and tears around the place generally causing chaos.

Having done the Lake District, Whitby, Norwich and Anglesey, Jones begins this second run in Moray, Scotland. There are more episodes than series one, and each is longer, plus it has added Joanna Lumley as narrator, which is a nice touch – as if one travel presenter is waving to another.

Jones’s companion is presenter and Strictly almost-finalist AJ Odudu, and the pair have big “hen do for an outdoorsy bride” energy. It looks like a lot of fun, though perhaps less so for the guides showing them how to do things. They try clay pigeon shooting – there are plenty of gags about a woman with cerebral palsy being handed a shotgun – and whisky tasting, and they row across a loch, or part of it, and visit an eco-village where they make clay pots, or at least try to, and then they climb a mountain. It has the feel of a very British holiday, in that it’s often pouring it down and nobody really wants to be there, but everyone is going to make the bloody best of it, OK, because the queue to go through security at the airport now extends into the long-stay car park and the Airbnb was non-refundable and it was either this or glamping at the pig farm down the road, so shut up and eat your packed lunch in the car.

It’s messy and chaotic and silly, and it certainly doesn’t skimp on fun. They get the giggles over whisky (“sausage roll” is not, it turns out, a tasting note), and lose the plot over the pottery wheel, when every sentence uttered by their poor potter is caressed into a euphemism. I will never be able to watch the Great British Pottery Throwdown without thinking of their faces at the suggestion that they “stabilise the rim”. Though the general idea is that they will take on challenges, the biggest challenge of the whole episode turns out to be when the owner of the eco-village tries to get them to be silent in the “quiet garden”, where residents usually go to meditate.

The danger of taking this tone – naughty kids at the back of the class – is that it might seem sneery, but this pulls off a tricky double-hander. It is frank about the slightly grey rubbishness of certain UK holidays and the things we do to make them entertaining, while also celebrating these traditions and activities with unfettered, slightly unhinged glee, from the good parts to the bad. It feels like a very honest postcard from a sensible summer break. At the end, Odudu and Jones do eventually climb their mountain (“I thought it would be more of a big hill”) and reach the summit, only for the weather to turn so spectacularly that they barely have a view of their own hands, let alone any picture-perfect scenery. It is a highly relatable ending.

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Rosie Jones (Self - Presenter) Joanna Lumley (Self - Narrator) Olivia Colman (Self - Narrator) Rachel Stubbings (Saskia Blazenberg - Channel 4 Commissioner) Joe Wilkinson (Self - Guest) Jenny Eclair (Self - Guest) Scarlett Moffatt (Self - Guest) Jamali Maddix (Self - Guest) Guz Khan (Self - Guest) Tom Rosenthal (Self - Guest)

Rosie Jones, James Kettle, Nicola Dempsey

Comedian Rosie Jones invites a celebrity friend to join her on a trip exploring the sights, culture, history and local traditions of an area of the UK.

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Trip Hazard: My Great British Adventure, Channel 4, review: Affable chaos made for a relatable travelogue

There have been plenty of series extolling the joys of the british holiday recently, but rosie jones' gung-ho approach set this one apart.

In the long (long) line of UK-based pandemic travel programmes, at least Rosie Jones ’ offering Trip Hazard admitted upfront that production had basically made do with what they could, promising footage of the comedian “doing all the magical things legally permissible at the time of filming”.

The intro was in keeping with the tone of the show, which kept things irreverent at all times with a chirpy Come Dine With Me -style narration by Olivia Colman . In the first episode, Jones was joined by Scarlett Moffatt for a jaunt around the Lake District (although Moffatt did spend half the trip thinking she was in Yorkshire). Although it trod the same literal ground as other travelogue shows, this was a world away from other gentle, meandering explorations of Britain’s best walks/canals/train journeys/teacakes.

Instead, the affable chaos saw Jones, a self-confessed “professional idiot”, break an antique sausage-making machine, stage a live-action role-play Viking fight in front of some bemused picnickers and write a poem inspired by William Wordsworth that ended with the immortal lines: “Boobs. Boobs. Boobs. Jodie Comer.”

The meta layer of plot, featuring Jones’ interactions with Channel 4 commissioner “Saskia” (played by Rachel Stubbings) had its moments – “You’re very good for us. You tick a lot of boxes. Woman. Disabled. Gay. Northern.” – but felt a bit The Trip -lite.

It’s easy to feel fatigued by quite how many times we’re being reminded of the beauty of the British Isles, but Trip Hazard isn’t aiming for aspirational. Rather, it’s about the gung-ho approach you have to take when holidaying at home, and the giggly silliness of being away with your mates. Especially if you’re watching a sausage-making demonstration.

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In Trip Hazard, Rosie Jones proves to be an unlikely inspiration

The format isn't exactly original, but watching the comedian try new things and either smash them or balls them up is an absolute tonic

Lady Leshurr and Rosie Jones abseil the National Lift Tower in Northampton for Channel 4's Trip Hazard. Image: CPL Productions

In the last few years, the news cycle has been more dramatic than one of the Real Housewives of Beverly Hills after being served a weak Aperol spritz. Everything is on fire, everything is unfair, and everyone is distracting themselves with King Charles’s sausage fingers and Harry Styles’s trousers and the Apple iOS 16 update – or they’re crying and wailing and sharing poorly drawn cartoons of Paddington on social media, wondering what on earth is going to happen next.  

But despite all the mad stuff that’s been going on in the world, personally I feel like I’ve been in a weird rut since 2020. Somehow day-to-day life feels pretty samey. Boring, even. I work, I scroll through the binfire of hell that is the internet and screenshot memes about Chris Pine, and I still do my stupid lockdown walk, which has stubbornly inserted itself into my routine like a guest that refuses to leave. Occasionally I may go to M&S and buy a salad, which feels like such a novelty that I should put it in my diary. 

When I try to do more than a few things a week, though, like I would have done in 2019, I feel completely overwhelmed. Two days in a row in the office and I’m practically dead, and if I go out with friends, I pay for it for weeks. I find everything weirdly emotional and intense, and I’m wary of people (because recent evidence points to them being completely mad), but also in awe of them. It’s a strange knife-edge between suffocating boredom and sensory overload.   

Some people though, are not deterred by post-pandemic fatigue. instead, they’re taking life by the balls, abseiling down tall buildings and milking goats with Lady Leshurr in Northampton. Last week, I belatedly discovered comedian Rosie Jones’s Channel 4 show Trip Hazard where she does just that, and I felt something shift inside me. A glimmer of… what was that? Inspiration? 

The format isn’t exactly original (comedian and guest celeb go to different counties in the UK and do wacky local stuff) but watching Rosie Jones try new things and either smash them or balls them up is an absolute tonic. Unlike most presenters, who like to marinate in their own egos while exploring Tuscany in a vintage sports car, Rosie goes all in, unfazed by Viking reenactments, rap battles, stunt driving, microlite flying and sheep herding. Narrated by Joanna Lumley of all people, it’s joyfully silly and goofy, and gave me a sense that there was a richer life on my doorstep if I could only summon the enthusiasm. There are loads of goats to milk out there! What’s stopping me?   

So, last week I took myself on a very low-key lone adventure to the glittering metropolis of Troon on the Ayrshire coast, about 45 minutes outside Glasgow. (I know, I’m a regular Eddie the Eagle, aren’t I?) When I arrived, I was immediately rewarded with miles and miles of silvery sand and big skies – like being given an amazing present. I had a sandwich and bought some old-fashioned champagne glasses from the charity shop, then I sat on a bench that said ‘In Memory of Ida, 83 Years Young’ and almost fell asleep in the sunshine. Literally nothing happened, but even this tiny jaunt out of my uncomfortable comfort zone was a pleasure. So I’d like to thank Rosie Jones for inspiring me to go and sit on a bench somewhere else and making me feel less insane. At least now I have something to put in my diary apart from “had a nice prawn salad for my lunch”. And you never know, next week I might even go to Ayr – which I hear also has an M&S. Crazy times.  

Rosie Jones’s Trip Hazard: My Great British Adventure is available to watch online from Channel 4

Lucy Sweet  is a freelance journalist

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Trip Hazard: My Great British Adventure

Preview of Rosie Jones's new Channel 4 travel show

The landscape of Britain takes a back seat to larking about as Rosie Jones becomes the latest comedian to embark on her own travel series. She is, in the words of Olivia Colman’s voiceover, ‘a disabled, northern Joanna Lumley’ – though that’s probably imbuing the stand-up with a classiness that’s more aspirational than witnessed.

For as she travels the Lake District, Jones displays the comic sensibilities of a 14-year-old boy, gushing endlessly about ‘boobs’ when invited to channel the poetic spirit of Wordsworth or barely stifling giggles at every double-entendre that a Cumberland sausage-making sessions affords – which is plenty. In her mischievousness, she is egged on by her equally immature travelling companion, the erstwhile Gogglebox star and I’m A Celebrity champ Scarlett Moffatt. Not that she needs much encouragement, mind…

Jones’s juvenile streak is endearingly silly, exuding a giddy joie de vivre throughout her adventures, as if she can’t believe her luck that she’s getting paid to do this. Trip Hazard is certainly a counterpoint to Richard Ayoade ’s (equally funny) arch detachment in Channel 4’s well-established short-break stalwart, Travel Man.

In their breezy Cumbrian escapades, Jones and Moffatt get carried away with a Viking re-enactment, even if they don’t see the point of it, test the patience of that artisan sausage-maker - (as well as the breaking point of his antique equipment), drive a century-old traction engine, and pay an extortionate amount of money to sleep in a stable. But at least they got to order pudding for breakfast – a perfect metaphor for the sweet, cheeky pleasure this half-hour offers.

Travel sequences, gorgeous drone shots and sly gags in Coleman’s script are interspersed with a few skits with Rachel Stubbings playing a stereotypically out-of-touch TV executive who commissioned Trip Hazard, and Tom Allen undermining his affable, erudite image. As a former researcher at Channel 4, Jones knows this world - but like everything in this show, it’s teased with an infectious affection.

And that’s why spending half an hour in her enthusiastic company – wherever in the UK that happens to be - is such an easy delight.

• Trip Hazard: My Great British Adventure is on Channel 4 at 8.30pm tonight.

• Read an interview with Rosie Jones about the show

Review date: 9 Apr 2021 Reviewed by: Steve Bennett

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Trip Hazard

• 2021 - 2022
• 9 episodes (2 series)

A comic travelogue spoofing the travelogue format itself, fronted by Rosie Jones . Also features Rachel Stubbings , Olivia Colman and Joanna Lumley .

Episode menu

Series 2, episode 2 - blackpool, further details.

Rosie takes Man Like Mobeen star Guz Khan to Blackpool, where she's booked the UK's highest skydive: a ridiculous 15,000-foot drop.

Before they take on this challenge of a lifetime, they psych themselves up with classic Blackpool mainstays - a palm reader whose family have been telling fortunes there for a century, and the tallest roller coaster in the country.

There's a trip to an indoor skydiving centre to get used to feeling the Gs, and Rosie takes their minds off their impending doom with an iconic Blackpool activity: dancing. Not just a hip-hop dance lesson, but also a traditional waltz competition at the legendary Blackpool Tower Ballroom.

At the end of the trip, will they go through with the terrifying skydive?

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Rosie Jones' Trip Hazard

In the Lake District Rosie and Scarlett Moffatt re-enact a Viking battle and bed down with a couple of stallions when they check in at one of the most unusual hotel rooms imaginable.

Joe Wilkinson joins Rosie Jones for a traditional seaside outing in coastal town Whitby, where they go crazy for golf, explore the Jurassic Coast, and goth-up to take to the stage.

Rosie takes comedian Jamali Maddix to Norwich. They learn to molly dance, go wine tasting, tour the cathedral, hammer some hot metal and join a wrestling tag team.

Comedian Jenny Eclair joins Rosie for an outdoorsy adventure on Anglesey in Wales. They have a go at sheep herding, traverse the world's fastest zip wire and learn beach survival skills at sunset.

Rosie Jones travels to unlikely corners of the UK in search of adventure, excitement and silliness. AJ Odudu joins Rosie in Moray, northern Scotland, as they climb Cairn Gorm, go clay pigeon shooting, row across a loch and sample whisky.

Rosie takes Guz Khan to Blackpool, where they visit a fortune teller and go waltzing at the legendary Blackpool Tower Ballroom. But a 15,000-foot skydive could be too terrifying for them.

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Rosie Jones

Joanna Lumley

Olivia Colman

Tom Levinge

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Trip Hazard: My Great British Adventure – Season 1, Episode 2

More like this, cast & crew.

Rosie Jones

Olivia Colman

Tom Levinge

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Trip Hazard: My Great British Adventure — Season 1, Episode 2

Episode info.

Comedian Rosie Jones takes celebrity friends on thrilling outings around Britain, gorging on culture, learning local traditions and seeking excitement in unlikely places

Rosie takes Scarlett Moffatt to explore the Lake District, where they re-enact a Viking battle at Kendal Castle, eat lunch cooked from the heat of a coal engine and bed down with a couple of stallions

Series 1 Episode 4

Anglesey: Rosie and Jenny Eclair visit Anglesey. They herd sheep and try a very, very fast zip wire.

Series 1 Episode 3

Norwich: In Norwich, Rosie and Jamali Maddix hammer some hot metal and join a wrestling team

Series 1 Episode 2

Whitby: Rosie and Joe Wilkinson go crazy for golf, visit the Jurassic Coast and goth-up in Whitby

Series 1 Episode 1

The Lake District: Rosie and Scarlett Moffatt re-enact a Viking battle in Kendal and bed down with stallions

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Rosie Jones’ Trip Hazard

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• Cast & crew
• Episode aired Apr 9, 2021

Comedian Jenny Eclair joins Rosie for an outdoorsy adventure on Anglesey in Wales. They have a go at sheep herding, traverse the world's fastest zip wire and learn beach survival skills at s... Read all Comedian Jenny Eclair joins Rosie for an outdoorsy adventure on Anglesey in Wales. They have a go at sheep herding, traverse the world's fastest zip wire and learn beach survival skills at sunset. Comedian Jenny Eclair joins Rosie for an outdoorsy adventure on Anglesey in Wales. They have a go at sheep herding, traverse the world's fastest zip wire and learn beach survival skills at sunset.

• Tom Levinge
• James Kettle
• Rosie Jones
• Olivia Colman
• Jenny Eclair

• Self - Presenter

• Self - Narrator
• Self - Guest
• Saskia Blazenberg - Channel 4 Commissioner
• Self - Special Guest
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• April 9, 2021 (United Kingdom)
• United Kingdom
• Channel 4 (United Kingdom)
• Channel 4 Television
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