Haven’t we suffered enough from male celeb travel shows?

Sign up to our free IndyArts newsletter for all the latest entertainment news and reviews Sign up to our free IndyArts newsletter Sign up to our free IndyArts newsletter SIGN UP I would like to be emailed about offers, events and updates from The Independent. But less fun!” open image in gallery Gold standard: ‘Mortimer & Whitehouse: Gone Fishing’ is the rare exception to the rule when it comes to celebrity travel shows Outside of a few of these shows that are genuinely quite lovely – the gentle, dad-joke meander that is Mortimer & Whitehouse: Gone Fishing, for example, remains this genre’s gold standard – the results are typically rotten. In 2019, the comedian London Hughes sparked justifiable bafflement when she revealed on Twitter that she and Whoopi Goldberg could not, for the life of them, get a channel to commission a show in which they did everything from travelling to Ibiza to sitting in a caravan “making sausages”, adding: “It’s me and Whoopi Goldberg, who wouldn’t want to watch that?” A number of female comedians replied to Hughes’s tweet, saying they’d also struggled to get a foothold in the “funny people going on holiday for the telly” genre, including Gina Yashere and Meera Syal. It means it’s increasingly icky to watch the already wealthy embark on free vacations on behalf of creatively bankrupt TV channels; stars larking about experiencing far-away destinations that many can only ever dream of. And if you thought the genre’s nadir was Bradley Walsh encountering Mexico’s most dangerous bats with his aspiring TV personality son Barney – think an evil Roman Kemp – then you are wrong.