Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon's ‘The Trip’ Season Five Is Happening, Steve Coogan Tells a Traffic-Court Judge

The Trip is so back. Five years on from the fourth (and, many assumed, final) season of Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon's travelogue buddy comedy series, season five is in the works. How do we know that? Well, it's quite interesting, actually.

What happened was, Steve Coogan was in line for a six-month driving ban, in response to which, according to the Evening Standard, he wrote a letter to Birmingham Magistrates Court explaining that if he was banned for six months it would prevent him from doing the driving necessary to film season five of The Trip, with negative knock-on effects for everyone else (crew etc) being hired for the shoot as well as himself, and so could he please have a slightly shorter ban, please? Like, say, two months?

And the judge said yes! This isn't actually as outrageous as some people seem to think it is—it's fairly common for judges to exercise leniency over a sentence when a more severe one might interfere with someone's ability to do their job. And, most importantly of all, it means we're getting another season of one of the best and most interesting comedies this side of the millennium.

What's The Trip, again?

Pretty simple: Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon play fictional versions of themselves who have been asked by a newspaper to conduct a tour of a particular region's best restaurants and write up their thoughts on each place they visit. Each series is set in a different region.

Or that's the theory at least. In practice, relatively little attention is devoted to the food, and we instead get battling impressions of their favorite actors, alongside the esoteric conversational ramblings of funny and clever middle-aged men (if you like Curb Your Enthusiasm…) and occasional glimpses of more serious elements of their lives—like some extramarital carrying-on in previous seasons, which has been so convincing that people have berated Coogan and Brydon in real life for what they erroneously assume to be real behavior.

All of this is directed and written (though very loosely—the convincingly organic feel comes from the fact that much of the series is improvised) with an astutely delicate touch by Michael Winterbottom, perhaps best known for his previous collaboration with Coogan, 24 Hour Party People.

What will The Trip season 5 be about?

Well, we don't actually really know anything other than that it's happening right now. In as much as any of the seasons are really “about” anything, one strongly suspects we'll see a continuation of the tried and tested formula of driving and restaurant reviewing that has so far taken them to Lancashire, Italy, Spain and Greece.

If the trend of continuing to film further and further from home continues, then who knows— maybe the US? Much of the charm of seasons two, three and four especially came from Coogan and Brydon's engagement with the specific cultural and artistic histories of the areas they've been touring through, so one hopes it's somewhere with plenty of socio-literary meat for them to chew on. Maybe they'll bring it home and have Brydon take Coogan through Wales? That'd be nice.

When will we get The Trip season 5?

Coogan's letter to the court revealed that filming was due to start in June of this year, and the last three seasons have come out in March or April, so Spring 2026 feels like a pretty good bet.

This story originally appeared in British GQ.