A jolly – but exhausting – holiday with Johnny Vegas
Johnny Vegas: Carry On Glamping (Channel 4) is “a mid-life crisis that turned into a TV show”, according to the man himself. The first series ran in 2021, following the comedian’s attempts to set up a glamping business. In this new series, he’s looking for a bigger site. And a helicopter.
The helicopter isn’t for flying. The USP of Vegas’s site is that all the accommodation is in refurbished vehicles. He already has a Maltese bus called Patricia. People pay a lot for this sort of thing – Patricia costs £225 a night, according to the website, although she does have a bathroom so you don’t need to trek to the loo in the middle of the night wearing a head torch.
Vegas is accompanied everywhere by his personal assistant, the lovely Bev, who keeps a handle on things. We all need a Bev in our lives, but Vegas really does. He announced a year ago that he had been diagnosed with ADHD, which explains his impulsive behaviour. He dives into conversations with a charity about their helicopters (why does a donkey sanctuary own the remains of five Sea Kings?) without checking the price. In the second episode, he forms an instant attachment to a site in Anglesey, because he holidayed there as a boy, but it’s Bev who points out that there is no infrastructure and amenities are miles away.
Eventually, he finds a Puma helicopter which the owner says would fetch £13,600 on the open market, but within a minute he’s sold it to Vegas for £4,000. He takes delivery of a mouldy wreck of a boat, which does not go down well with the restorers, who declare: “It’s disgusting. It stinks. It’s a horrible sweat palace.”
There is cross-pollination with other TV series. We watch Vegas record an appearance on Big Zuu’s Big Eats (a cooking show) and act in Meet the Richardsons (a sitcom of sorts). One of the venues being offered as a possible glamping site is Jimmy’s Farm, which once had its own Channel 4 series. I wouldn’t be surprised if Stu, the engineer helping Vegas source and do up his helicopter, gets his own show.
Vegas is endearing but exhausting company, buoyant one moment and despondent the next. But when so many TV shows involve celebrities taking freebie jaunts/doing up houses/ tooling about in the jungle for exposure and cash, at least Vegas’s heart seems to be in it. Anita Singh
At the start of the second episode of Six Nations: Full Contact, Netflix’s behind-the-scenes series about the 2023 Six Nations Championship, England player Ellis Genge tells the camera that rugby union saved his life. It rescued him, he insists, from oblivion. Without it, he says – as he drives round the back streets of Bristol where he grew up, in the fancy motor that is his reward for a career in the game – he would have fallen in with others in the neighbourhood, selling drugs, ending up in prison. Or worse, he could have followed his dad and become a plumber.
That is about as deep an insight into rugby as you get in this series: it’s a tough game for tough lads. No hint of consequence from all those head-down collisions, certainly no mention of the 300 ex-pros currently suing the rugby boards for compensation for brain damage. But then Full Contact is not here to offer revelation, to expose or to critique. It is here to sell rugby union.
Ever since Drive to Survive brought many a new fan, particularly in the US, to Formula 1, sporting bodies have been queuing up to partner with streaming services in order to proselytise their offering. Golf, athletics, tennis – they have all used the documentary format to promote the game. And, for all its claims of unique access and behindthe-scenes footage, this is effectively what Full Contact is: one long advert.
This is rugby presented as the ultimate in gladiatorial combat, all slo-mo crunches and pitchside pyrotechnics, thumping tackles and beautifully spun passes – with the occasional swearword thrown in to insist on authenticity. That doesn’t mean that, despite the teeth-grinding exposition in the voiceover (“England have been playing Scotland since 1871”), there is no fun to be had. Welsh, Irish and Scottish fans will particularly enjoy a rerun of the England team’s haplessness in the 2023 tournament.
But if you want to peer through a window into quite how extraordinarily demanding rugby union can be, physically and mentally, give this a swerve and dig out a DVD of Living with Lions, the precursor of modern sporting documentaries, shot on the British and Irish Lions tour of South Africa 27 years ago. Now that really is an insight.
Johnny Vegas: Carry On Glamping ★★★
Six Nations: Full Contact ★★