Steve Coogan

In The Trip, Steve Coogan plays a fictionalised version of himself: a restless, status-conscious actor-comedian who takes a newspaper commission to tour restaurants across northern England, expecting a girlfriend to join him. Instead he's stuck with Rob Brydon, and spends the drive needling him, dropping name-checks, and worrying aloud about his career and legacy.

The joke is that Coogan plays himself as slightly worse than he probably is — vain, competitive, faintly lonely — and commits to it without vanity. Watching him one-up Brydon's impressions with his own, then lose, then sulk beautifully over a plate of foam, is a small, specific comedy of ego undone by proximity to a happier man.