John Bishop and Jason Byrne are making a television survival show in the wilds of Patagonia.
The pair are heading to the southern tip of the Andes in December to shoot Uncharted With Ray Goggins for Irish channel RTÉ, in which the ex-special forces man introduces celebrities to some of the most remote and treacherous environments on the planet.
Spending five days in the region without mobile phones, Bishop will be the show’s first non-Irish participant, though he has considerable Irish ancestry.
The show’s previous two series have featured Irish Army veteran Goggins leading comedian PJ Gallagher and Game of Thrones star Liam Cunningham up the Himalayas; comic Kyla Cobbler and presenter Angela Scanlon across the Atlas mountains in Morocco, as well as former Irish prime minister Leo Varadkar through South Africa and hip-hop trio Kneecap into the Arctic Circle.
Byrne’s long-time friend Gallagher opened up about his mental health struggles on the show, while Cobbler and Scanlon confronted their shared vertigo.
However, keen outdoorsman Bishop, who has taken part in several cycling endurance challenges, including from Sydney to Liverpool in 1992, appears undaunted by the trip to the region, which spans the bottom of Argentina and Chile.
On The Bishop Exchange, the podcast he hosts with his Irish-American comedian namesake Des Bishop, the Liverpudlian stand-up pointed out that: ’I say you’re not connected to anything, [but] you’re making a telly show.
‘So there’s some bloke there with the camera, you know what I mean? It’s not really as hard as it’s gonna look or sound. But that is one of those things where they go, "oh no, no phones’. Because they just won’t work anyway.’
The conversation prompted him to observe that if he’d been on Celebrity Traitors, he’d have only pretended to surrender his phone. Recorded before the final episode of the latest series went out last night, he poured cold water on the idea of him appearing on the BBC ratings juggernaut in the future.
‘I don’t like that idea of over-exposure in terms of someone filming you constantly and then they pick the bits that they show,’ he said. ‘If someone was to say to me, "Do you want to go to a castle for two weeks with a load of celebrities and play a game or do you want to ride your motorbike across Europe on your own?", I’d take the second one.
’But then you know I’m mates with Claudia [Winkleman] and Claudia absolutely loves it. She is so invested in it and I think that comes across and I think that’s probably why [it] is so successful because she so commits to it. She loves it … she loves the whole jeopardy that it creates.
‘So listen who knows? But I just can’t see me doing it to be honest. Though you never know.’
The 59-year-old also dismissed the appeal of Strictly Come Dancing, despite Des Bishop, who took part in Ireland’s version, Dancing With The Stars, in 2017, insisting: ‘It’d be the most fun you’ve ever had in your life… John, you take yourself too fucking seriously, man.’
One show which the Scouse comic is enthused about, however, is Sky’s upcoming stand-up showcase John Bishop’s Comedy Night At The Coliseum, which was announced this week and which will also be filmed in December.
Bishop said that the booking process is under way. His Irish namesake was approached to appear but was unable to take part because of touring commitments in Australia.
Bishop hailed the 2,300-seater London Coliseum, which opened in 1904 and is the largest in London’s West End, as ’absolutely beautiful’.
He added: ‘Charlie Chaplin famously used to do a sketch where he played a drunk in one of the side boxes and [would] fall out the box and catch himself and pull himself back up. So you know, to do a theatre that Charlie Chaplin was a regular in is going to be a joy. It’s gonna be great.’
- by Jay Richardson
