Neil Morrissey and Martin Clunes are back behaving badly now they’ve been reunited and are travelling through France together in an epic new TV series
Neil Morrissey and Martin Clunes are reunited for some more bad behaviour
They found fame in Men Behaving Badly – and now Neil Morrissey and Martin Clunes have the chance to be just that as they set off on a boys’ tour around France. Neil & Martin’s Bon Voyage is a new three-part series following the duo as they mark 40 years of friendship with a trip to some of the country’s most beautiful regions including the Dordogne River, the vineyards of Bordeaux and the peaks of the Pyrénées.
Along the way they see the famous white horses of the Camargue, try to paint like Van Gogh in Arles and enjoy a tipple on top of Europe’s largest sand dune. But their favourite part of the trip was simply being together for the longest amount of time since the 90s when Neil says, “Fame came so quickly it was like being shot out of a cannon.”
Martin Clunes, Neil Morrissey, Caroline Quentin and Leslie Ash starred in Men Behaving Badly(Image: ExpressStar)
“The best thing about this trip was we were given licence to hang out together for three weeks,” adds Martin. “In the past, we’ve seen each other for a meal or a weekend here, weekend there. To be brought together was just great.”
The pair first met four decades ago backstage at a production of Peter Pan in Bristol where Neil was playing a pirate and Martin was visiting a friend who was playing the title role. While Martin was still unknown in 1984, Neil was already on TV, playing Rocky in the ITV drama Boon. Neil, 62, recalls, “We got it together and there were certain haunts, and our careers were on a similar sort of pathway…”
Neil Morrissey and Martin Clunes reunited in their sixties
Here, Martin begs to differ, interrupting, “No they weren’t! You were hugely successful, you were in Boon, you had a mobile phone and your own Volkswagen Golf.” By 1992, the boys had become close pals and were then cast together in Men Behaving Badly. They played cheeky beer-guzzling geezers Gary and Tony opposite Caroline Quentin and Leslie Ash, who starred as their love interests Dorothy and Deborah.
And just as Tony and Gary were never without a pint on the hit sitcom, Neil and Martin explore their love of alcoholic drinks in this U&Gold series. The first episode opens with the pair enjoying a beverage on top of a sand dune before Martin arrives at Neil’s French home and gifts him an open bottle of booze, apologising, “I got thirsty in the night.” However, Martin, 63, blames the editors for making it look like they spent more time drinking than exploring the countryside. “Is there a lot of us drinking in it?” he asks innocently before chuckling, “Well they’ve done that on purpose!”
Neil Morrissey and Martin Clunes chuckle over a beer as they sit on a green picnic bench
While Neil admits they chinked glasses so many times they could get a fourth episode out of that alone. He adds, “You could get an hour of the amount of times we press glasses…”
During the 90s both actors lived in London and were regulars on the showbiz scene. These days Martin lives in Dorset with his wife Philippa Braithwaite and and Neil spends most of his time living in France with his lawyer love Emma Killick enjoying a quiet life.
Neil says, “Em and I have had a place here now for nearly 20 years, and you can probably see it’s a humble little old farmer’s cottage dating back to 1790 so it’s absolutely beautiful. You don’t get disturbed. Old ladies elbow me out of the way of the prize onions in the market!”
Neil Morrissey and Martin Clunes wear hazmat suits to go inside a wine vat at a vineyard
Martin also has an affinity with the country through the many holidays he’s enjoyed there, but he admits he relied on Neil to do most of the talking on their travels, joking, “The trick with Johnny Frenchman is to just shout English louder at them and they pretty much buck up. They know what we’re saying. They’re just being bloody minded with their own language.”
Neil laughs along, insisting, “He’s not far wrong there, is he?” And it’s that sense of humour the pair have in common. “We have a similar perspective on comedy,” says Neil, “so it was easy to have a laugh as well.”
There are jokes a plenty in this series, with Martin going for an early gag as he tastes a glass of white Semillon wine and quips, “I’ve got a bit of a semi on.” While it’s clear their 90s humour has never left them, they admit that Men Behaving Badly would not be commissioned in today’s world of woke TV.
Neil Morrissey and Martin Clunes have been friends for 40 years
On the show, Neil says, “Tony and Gary were misogynistic ne’er-do-wells but we kind of captured the zeitgeist because there was a lot of talk about laddism and we were given that title of ‘the lads’ of the era. You couldn’t get away with making Men Behaving Badly now. However, Neil insists the show never intended to be sexist or misogynistic. “If you said misogyny to either Tony or Gary, they’d have probably thought it was a Polish sausage,” insists Neil.
“Or a star sign!” laughs Martin. “They are totally in awe of women and blown away by them and worshipped them in an inappropriate way.” But both concede society wouldn’t accept the show today where things have become very black and white. “Life has changed,” says Martin. “With some social media and the entire world becoming a journalist, and everything becoming so polarized that it’s like, they said something inappropriate, therefore it can’t be funny, it must be bad. Let’s stamp it out and cancel it all,’ rather than seeing any nuance in life. Nuance has gone out of fashion. I think everything’s become bold and brash in terms of comedy.”
Neil Morrissey and Martin Clunes paddle their green and yellow canoe along a river in France
This isn’t the lads’ first tour together. Before the 2000 Olympics in Australia they took a tour Down Under taking the route the Olympic torch would take. Neil reminisces to Martin: “You checked out the brothel! And I checked out, well I daren’t even say it in case I get prosecuted, but I went to a bar one evening where when a pint glass got full of coins the ladies took their tops off!”
Martin has fond memories too and laughs, “Skimpies? Skimpies is still going! We went on some capers.” However, their favourite moments on this tour were a little more tame. “The sunset was nice but it was a bit mosquito-y,” says Martin. “Going fishing was great.”
