Rob Brydon reveals surprise and disappointment after period drama role was cancelled after one season

But the BBC didn’t stop coming. Instead, it’s just made Brydon presenter of Destination X, a new show – part The Traitors, part Race across the World – that takes 13 people to various mystery European locations, where they have to work out, as Brydon puts it, “where the X am I?”. They’re transported in two blacked-out buses; one to sleep in and a mobile operations centre where confused contestants receive clues as they try to judge their position on a map.

It’s an idea originally from Belgium, and while developing it the BBC was looking for someone the public liked to front it. Brydon – Glamorgan-born star of the likes of Marion and Geoff, Would I Lie to You? and The Trip – is just that man, the centre of public affection ever since he brought to us the relentlessly upbeat Uncle Bryn in Gavin & Stacey. “So many people were coming up to me when the Gavin & Stacey special went out last year,” he says. “One woman in Kingston [upon Thames] WH Smith wanted to thank me. She’d been alone at Christmas and watching it had felt like she was part of a family.”

But Destination X comes with a twist for fans of Brydon’s nice-guy image. Every week he must do something truly nasty, throwing people off the show and denying their dreams of a life-changing victory. It starts in episode one, when contestants who are only just recovering from the surprise of Brydon walking into the shot – “They didn’t know it was going to be me” – are almost immediately told to go home.

Seeing him smash contestants’ hopes is unsettling, for us and him. “I remember the look of disappointment on one contestant’s face when I said, ‘I’m sorry, you’re going.’ He looked devastated. I thought, ‘God, he’s taken that badly.’ I turned to the camera and said, ‘Well, that doesn’t feel nice’. And that was my genuine reaction.”

The contestants include nuclear engineers, police officers and online ‘content creators’. Some admit to having no general knowledge, others claim to be excellent at working out clues (guess who does better). They have to contend with vehicle windows that magically mist up and must wear special goggles if they go outside. The show is so tightly policed public toilets are out of bounds, so the buses are followed by a mobile poo station – two Portaloos on a trailer. On top of this, contestants must plot and scheme against each other. The winner receives a £100,000 cash prize and, frankly, deserves it.

“They sent me the Belgian version to watch,” he says. “The bus was dingy inside, not pleasant. The host was mysterious and drove a motorbike. I said, ‘I’m not doing all that.’ ” Instead, he took inspiration from the UK’s queen of competition programming. “I looked at Claudia Winkleman,” he adds. “She does such a great job; gets the balance just right. I like Claudia.”

Brydon, who lives in south-west London with his second wife Claire Holland and their two sons (he has three adult children with his first wife Martina Jones), turned 60 in May. “When you’re young you can’t imagine being 60,” he says. “You tell yourself, that’s never going to happen to me. It’s the strangest thing. I remember when I was a teenager going to my friend’s parents’ 50th birthday and thinking, ‘Well, they’re basically about to pop off.’ Now I’m way more interested in being healthy, being more aware of what I eat and exercising and moving. I’m into all the fashionable things – sauna and cold plunge, trying to get ahead of the train.”

Brydon didn’t enjoy early success. “It didn’t happen to me until I was 35, that’s a long time to be hustling,” he says. “I never forget all the years when I was knocking on doors.” So does that explain some of his self-doubt? “It was a big struggle for a long time,” he muses. “But you do need luck. You need some synchronicity. You need those Sliding Doors moments. I know plenty of very talented people that it hasn’t happened for.”

The public might be used to him, but Brydon says he doesn’t feel like he’s been around for a long time. “Some people say to me, ‘I’ve grown up watching you.’ The first few times you hear that, you think, ‘Really? What are you talking about?’ But then you sit and you do the calculations, and yes, I suppose you could have done. It’s a curious thing to adjust to, being described as a veteran.” He pauses and considers the words and their implications: “Veteran performer, veteran actor.”

As well as the saunas and cold plunges, at 60 Brydon has adjusted his professional attitude. “I thought, I’m just going to do what I like now.” He’s signed up for a new series of Michael Winterbottom’s The Trip with Steve Coogan, this time a Nordic adventure.

Wasn’t The Trip to Greece in 2020 going to be the final one? “By the time you get to the end of living in each other’s pockets for five weeks, poking each other with sticks, you’ve had enough. Then time passes and one day you get a call from Michael and he says, ‘I’m thinking of doing another Trip.’ And he’s irresistible. So you go, ‘Yes, OK. Scandinavia.’ ”

When Brydon agreed to the first instalment of The Trip in 2010, he envisaged an on-screen relationship with Coogan based on the 1988 Robert de Niro and Charles Grodin buddy movie Midnight Run. “At our best, yes, we have the dynamics of a double act,” he says. “I put myself in the Grodin role and Steve as De Niro. And then at other times, perhaps it’s a little more Peter Cook and Dudley Moore in its aspiration. He would be more Peter Cook and I would be Dudley Moore.”

One of Brydon’s earliest memories is watching the duo’s 1960s sketch series Not Only… But Also, as a boy. “It was beautiful, timeless comedy with two people at the top of their game. So much to learn from watching those two.” He’s less keen on the duo’s later Derek and Clive routines. “There Peter’s being pretty cruel to Dudley and I don’t like that.”

Coogan, too, can be cruel. In 2020’s The Trip to Greece he says, “Rob is known for accessible light entertainment.” And it’s not meant as a compliment. “I like to entertain,” says Brydon. “And I genuinely like all those different branches of entertaining.”

But as his breakthrough roles in the sublime Marion and Geoff and Human Remains made clear, Brydon is an accomplished character actor. Shouldn’t he have done more of that and less hosting? “I do wonder, ‘What if I had just done that kind of thing, had been that kind of guy?’ ” he admits.

“But I also love hosting. I love singing. And for a long time, I shied away from those things. I turned down some hosting gigs before I did Would I Lie to You? because I thought it would compromise my believability as an actor.”

Not everything he does works. Brydon loved being in the 2024 Tudor fantasy period drama My Lady Jane and then Amazon Prime Video dropped it. “Oh, I was disappointed!” he says. “I was surprised, because my perception of it was that it was a hit. But I’m quite good at shrugging it off. I’m OK with those things because I experienced getting dropped from shows before. I was let go as a radio presenter on Radio Wales. I was let go as a TV host on a movie show I did on Sky. The new guy who came in got rid of me.”

And if he saw that guy in a pub tonight, would Brydon take pleasure in pointing out how wrong he had been? “That’s so interesting,” says Brydon, sounding a little disappointed, I fear, by such a low thought. “But no. It’s always unsavoury when someone’s show comes to an end and you see them moaning about it in the press. No one owes you this. You don’t have a right to it. I’m still here, still working. It’s great. How can you moan about that? How could you do anything that would make you difficult to work with?”

And yet, we often hear about people in light entertainment who are difficult to work with. “I certainly hear stories,” says Brydon, “and it’s just inexplicable to me, kicking off about things. If you can’t see that getting to do stuff like this is just gravy, then you need to have a little chat with yourself. What have I got to complain about?” There speaks a man who doesn’t have to share the mobile poo station.

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