Rob Brydon to reinvent himself as a 'fashion icon' in new £20million BBC show
As host of BBC1's new reality gameshow Destination X - rumoured to be costing £20million - Rob Brydon decided the time had come to reinvent himself.
So grabbing himself a stylist and a whole new wardrobe, he says he has "gone for it". And Rob, best known for his roles on Would I Lie to You and Gavin & Stacey, says he is hoping to be considered 'a fashion icon' once the show airs.
He laughed: 'I've been more experimental with my wardrobe than in the past, and I think that can only be a treat. And there are often clues in what I'm wearing. Sometimes it's sort of region appropriate, with little flourishes.
'I thought as the show is on such a grand scale, it would be fun to be a little less conservative than my normal TV wear. So, I had a wonderful stylist who suggested all sorts of different things. I've gone for it.'
The TV star accompanies up to 13 players on the road around Europe in a blacked-out bus as they struggle to work out where they are, based on helpful clues but hampered by red herrings. Each episode, the player whose guess is the furthest away is eliminated.
But at one point Rob feared he'd given away where they were next travelling to by putting his foot in it. 'You did have to be very careful,' he sighed. 'We were about to visit a lovely location and I was looking forward to it and I was chatting to some of the crew and I said out loud, 'I can't wait to get to… Swansea.' And it wasn't Swansea.
'And then I realised that just over there was one of the players and I had a sinking feeling in my stomach. Luckily, they didn't hear. I can be sure of that, because of what happened next.'
He said that in the beginning all the players are supporting each other but that changes as the 10-part series progresses. 'Only one person can win the money, I think that's the crux of it. It really takes some turns, particularly as it gets closer and closer to the prize, there's some interesting behaviour.'
Rob, who is there to help "dissolve the tension", says he loved turning Europe into a board game for the BBC1 series, which starts next Wednesday. 'No spoilers, but we do take over whole castles. We run a train on a public network, we take over cable car systems, the scale just goes up and up.'
The presenter, who took inspiration from cloak-loving Traitors host Claudia Winkleman for the role, said he'd had a lovely time not sleeping on the bus like the rest of them. 'I did the journey. I mean, I wasn't on the bus, I wasn't sleeping in a bunk," he chuckled. "But yeah, I would follow them round and then I would greet them and it was great.'
Executive producer Dan Adamson says that the series was shot over 32 days using a 190-strong crew and involved 7,000 hotel rooms in 25 different locations. During filming they travelled more than 11,000km while shooting over 2000 hours of footage, much of it caught by the 46 cameras on board the bus.
They even had a toilet trailer following behind with 'a couple of portaloos' to allow the players to have comfort breaks in private. The TV funnyman says the lengths they went to in order to keep their location secret was extraordinary. 'I'd arrive at a new location and it was as if they'd built a new town," he gasped.
"We would put the buses alongside each other. We would bring in a bathroom bus. We'd have a little glam bus. That would make a little rectangle courtyard. We'd put carpet down, a running machine, and they could sit outside without knowing where they were. The scale of it, it was quite remarkable.'
But Rob, 60, claims he'd be a woeful player himself. 'I think I'd be terrible at it. If I got out and I saw the sun, that would tell me it's daytime.'
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