Rob And Rylan’s Grand Tour (BBC2)
Pay attention. This is a basic lesson in how to be a celeb. You’ll never make the A-list if you don’t learn the difference between ‘peacocking’ and ‘boating’.
Strutting between the fountains of Rome, the city they called ‘a narcissist’s paradise’, Rylan helpfully explained the finer points of showing off to Rob Rinder, on their Grand Tour.
‘Peacocking,’ he said, ‘is when you try and lord it about, just to prove to everyone what you are.’
Boating was rhyming slang, he explained, a term for flashing your wealth and swaggering as though everyone knows your ‘boat race’, or face.
Rob and Rylan have been boating with a vengeance ever since they arrived in Italy, and I’m not talking about their gondola ride in Venice
As they arrived in Rome for the final episode of their arts-and-sparkles travelogue, they were riding in a horse-drawn carriage
If I’ve understood him right, peacocking is a way of getting noticed, boating is for those who are already sure of being seen.
Rob and Rylan have been boating with a vengeance ever since they arrived in Italy, and I’m not talking about their gondola ride in Venice. They’ve glammed up in drag, stripped off to model for a life painting class, conducted a chamber orchestra, and had the Uffizi Gallery all to themselves.
As they arrived in Rome for the final episode of their arts-and-sparkles travelogue, they were riding in a horse-drawn carriage. This, Rob insisted, was in homage to Lord Byron, who passed through the city shortly before his death 200 years ago.
I wonder if there’s a word for madly pretentious boaters who want to convince us that their souls are overflowing with poetry. Bull-shippers, perhaps.
Thanks to their desperate need to impress, however, this series has taken us to some splendid palaces, museums and churches. Rome featured the most breathtaking of all, with visits not only to the keyring-and-teatowel sights such as the Colosseum and the Pantheon, but to lesser known wonders, too.
One was the Chiesa del Gesu, an early baroque church with spectacular murals that create the illusion of falling upwards into heaven.
Rylan, who hides behind a persona of camp flippancy, was moved to be in such a beautiful sacred space. ‘This smells like my childhood,’ he said. ‘I was an altar server in a Roman Catholic church.’ To use a Church of England metaphor, he’s like the Vicar of Dibley’s famous puddle: appears shallow, might have hidden depths.
The two of them posed as David and Goliath for a photo modelled on Italian Renaissance artist Caravaggio’s gory masterpiece
Thanks to their desperate need to impress, however, this series has taken us to some splendid palaces, museums and churches
He was delighted by the church’s special attraction, a painting of St Ignatius that creaks downwards into a recess every afternoon at 5.30, to reveal a gilded and melodramatic statue of… St Ignatius. It couldn’t be more camp if it played a selection of Abba hits.
Rob made a great display of disdain for such frippery, but he’s not above a bit of gilded melodrama himself — belting out Lionel Richie’s Endless Love at a karaoke bar. Quite the party animal after two Babychams, I suspect.
The two of them posed as David and Goliath for a photo modelled on Italian Renaissance artist Caravaggio’s gory masterpiece. Rob brandished a sword in one hand and Rylan’s head in the other.
To copy Goliath’s haircut, Rylan combed his quiff forward into a fringe. He looked like Claudia Winkleman with a beard.
