Interview with Brendan Sheerin

Over the past six years Channel 4’s Coach Trip has steadily gained more and more of a following as well as gaining momentum and becoming bigger and better as every series goes by.

Today Coach Trip is essential student viewing. It has gained a cult following and is regarded as highly amongst fans as seminal reality TV game shows such as Big Brother and Survivor.

There are several reasons for this popularity: there’s the opportunity to see some extraordinary places, see people turn on each other and argue in an international setting and of course there’s the star of the show: tour guide and presenter, Brendan Sheerin.

When I catch up with him, Brendan starts by telling me the story of how he became a tour guide more-or-less by accident when he had to take over from a girl mid-season whilst working on a summer job in Spain on the Costa Brava. “I was literally thrown in the deep end” he says. “I had a week of training with a Spanish guy and a week of training with an English girl and then they just gave me a clip board and said: ‘those are your people, go and see to them!’ I was definitely in the right place at the right time.”

Brendan found that he loved being a tour guide so much and that people responded so well to his ever upbeat manner so well that he went on being a guide.

“I was a guide for nearly 30 years. I did a lot of resorts in Europe like the Algarve, the Costa Brava, the Costa Blanca – before it exploded and became a bit tatty – and places like the Canaries and Costa Del Sol.”

It wasn’t until many years later that Brendan ended up working near to us here in York for the Scarbrough tourism office that the opportunity to do Coach Trip presented itself.

Brendan applied and thanks to his cheery and unflappable manner the producers saw his charm as a perfect fit for their new show. One practice run later and the show was being commissioned by Channel Four.

“We did a little pilot with only about four or five couples to start and we travelled from London up through Oxforshire. We spent a long weekend away figuring out how it would work, with the votes etc. Then we sent that off to Channel Four and they loved it!”

Brendan insists that nobody predicted how big of a hit the show would become. “From my point of view, when I first started I was just interested in the travel and going to these wonderful places. Then of course I saw their interaction and the dramas began to unfold!”

The beauty of the show definitely lies in the ‘trouble in paradise’ feel to the whole thing. On the one hand contestants are on the holiday of a lifetime but on the other, as Brendan tells me, “they’re in a confined space for quite a while and it gets very psychological.”

Whilst Brendan himself loves the travel aspect of the show he accepts that most people love the contestant interaction.

“There’s a part of everyone who loves to tune in to see who’s forming allegiances, who’s getting stabbed in the back and what’s going to happen come vote time. There’s a lot of intrigue.”

As you may expect as one of the only constants of the show Brendan has seen pretty much every combination of contestants come and go. He knows exactly how the game works. “With all respect to you students I find that the ones who have the best game plans are students and young people. Look at Paul and Matt [a pair of student contestants from the most recent series] the way they worked the coach, they managed to stay on for 33 days!”

“They started with a game plan straight away. That’s the secret. The older people are just getting to know each other and taking it slowly whereas these lads were in and networking from day one.”

But Brendan also warns that even the best laid plans can go awry. “I think people who try and instigate tactical voting have to be very, very careful. Everybody knows that there are game plans and that they need alliances to stay on but if you approach someone in the wrong way the whole plan can turn on you.”

The role of the tour guide is one that Brendan takes very seriously and as such he stays neutral when it comes to the voting. “Obviously I have my own views and I do see certain cliques forming,” he tells me “but in the end I have to be everybody’s friend.”

Coach Trip is often a dog-eat-dog world and people very rarely show any mercy when it comes time for the vote. Brendan recalls one couple who only lasted about two days (the shortest amount of time it’s possible to stay).

“There was once a lovely mother and son and I think I only had them in for Istanbul! The mother was a bit ill one day and the son was very quiet.” It goes to show that you do have to earn your place on the coach as Brendan tells me. “If you show any sign of weakness you become a target and the next thing you know you’re off!”

But despite all the talk of voting and allegiances, which makes the programme sound more like the build up to WW1 than a holiday programme, Brendan is keen to assure me that the trip really is worth going on. He calls it “the ultimate holiday” and the more he describes it the more I’m inclined to believe him. Everything from the start of your time on the coach is paid for, every drink, every activity and every meal.

As seen on the show the activities are as far ranging and diverse as the people. “The most exciting thing we’ve ever done I wasn’t actually allowed to do!” says Brendan. “We were about to go bungee jumping over the Corinth canal and the producers didn’t want me to do it just in case but I thought it was brilliant for the passengers anyway.”

Another highlight of the trip for Brendan was seeing his passengers going camel riding in the Sahara. “Sometimes you didn’t know which posterior was the biggest, the contestants or the camel!” he laughs.

However it’s not all thrill seeking and the usual holiday activities. People on the coach also get a good flavour of the local culture although Brendan admits that these don’t always go down too well.

“There are a few activities that I did think were a bit dull. A good example is sugaring the rose petals in Croatia or somewhere like that, that was a bit boring but it’s something that you’ll never do again so you should make the most of it – I always go in with gusto regardless.”

So what’s next for Coach Trip? I ask Brendan if he can give me any tidbits about the new series but he’s been sworn to secrecy. He does however give a small teaser about what’s in store for series five of the show: “I can tell you that we’ve never been there before – it’s virgin territory.”