Coach Trip: Road to Ibiza - Brendan Sheerin Interview

19 July 2016

International tour guide and Coach Trip legend Brendan is back! He’s ready with a full itinerary and his yellow and red cards for an action-parked summer adventure.

 

Explain a bit about the new series. It’s not your average Coach Trip, is it?
It’s the Road to Ibiza, and they’re all young people taking part. They’re all between 18 and 30, it’s like an 18-30 holiday on the coach. We start off in Magaluf, in Palma de Mallorca, and then we spend a month on the road, doing 30 episodes. They’re all young, with different hairstyles and tattoos, all pumped up. Some are educated, some are not, some know where they’re going, some don’t, some know where they ARE and some don’t. We still do the same two activities every day, of course. The Road to Ibiza bit is just that the route we take will end up in Ibiza, and the prize is a week in a hotel there, all expenses paid, with some pocket money. And they can party and enjoy Ibiza. And they get very, very competitive, they all want to end up with that prize.

 

Do you think it changes the dynamic, having only young people on the tour?
Well, yeah, but it’s for E4, and their whole dynamic is to do with the 18-35 age group. The show’s going to go out after Hollyoaks, so for me it’s going to be an entirely different audience! It’s prime time, whereas I’m used to having my grandmas and the schoolkids home from school watching. But I think it’ll show how it can work with youngsters, with a different sort of group. As I say, they’re very competitive, I don’t think any of them missed any of the activities we did, because they were all very conscious that if they missed an activity it would be giving fuel to a vote for the evening.

 

Is it more work for you? Do you find yourself having to police the youngsters a lot more?
For me, it’s the same, really. It doesn’t matter what age group I have, I still have to look after them and guide them through the activities, and then at the end of the night we have to vote as usual. But the votes! I have to say, there’s one vote that absolutely shocked me. I’ve never had a vote like it. All the tours I’ve done, I’ve never had a vote like this. I can’t say anything about it, but it’s a shocker. I’ve seen people be stabbed in the back, I’ve seen alliances formed, I’ve seen all sorts of things, but I’ve never seen anything like this.

 

What were your favourite group activities from the trip?
Well, we do a lot of the old favourites – we do the Segways, for example. And the route takes us around the Mediterranean, so we do a lot of aquatic things, which I love. Snorkelling, things like that. We do go-karting. Most of the activities are high-energy, they’re adrenaline-fuelled. Because they’re all young, they don’t want to be walking round an art museum, they want to be doing something active. We did one thing called sea-bobbing, which I’d never done. You know in one of the James Bond films he goes through the water using a little submarine machine. We do exactly that. It skims you along the top of the water, and then if you point it downwards you dive down underwater. So we did an array of activities, and they absolutely loved it. We did a life-drawing class, and all the guys were so excited. I’d told them they had to be respectful, that Maria was a lovely blonde Spanish lady. And then of course a bloke walked out. It was so easy to wind them up!

 

With lots of young people holidaying together the hormones will be flying around. Can we expect a degree of romance on the trip?
Oh yeah, definitely. Things like that do happen, I mean, they’re all young kids.

 

Can that then make things more complicated for you and for everyone else?
I think it does. If two girls are travelling and two boys are travelling, and one of the girls and one of the boys get together, the girl that hasn’t got the boyfriend loses her travelling partner. And that can cause a bit of friction.

 

Do you like the voting, or do you find it really awkward?
It depends. The longer the people are on, the more I get to know them, and the more I don’t want them to be voted off. I never want to know the result of the vote until it happens. And sometimes I am disappointed, especially if someone has been stabbed in the back. But a lot of the time, if I don’t particularly like a couple, the group won’t like them. Of course I don’t have anything to do with the vote, I’m Switzerland. But you find that the group picks up on the same vibes that I do.

 

How many tours have you done for Coach Trip now?
I think we must be up to about 14.

 

How did it first come about?
Andrew Brereton, who worked for 12 Yard, went home to his mum and dad’s in Stoke, and they’d just come off a coach trip. They were regaling him about the different couples and people being late, and everywhere they went and what they did, and who their guide was, and on the train from Stoke back to London, he had the idea for Coach Trip. My boss got an email saying they wanted a tour guide, and she recommended me, so I went down for an interview and got the job.

 

What have been your favourite places to visit?
I used to live and work in Barcelona, so I always love going back there. It’s a beautiful city. It hasn’t been spoilt. There’s nothing like going down the Grand Canal in Venice, that’s amazing. I love Rome, Florence is stunning, Pisa. And the South of France is stunning, and the whole of Tuscany! And never mind the places, it’s what we eat. You get to Italy and eat the best pasta. And the weight goes on!

 

Have you had favourite coach-trippers over the years?
Yeah. The longer they stay on, the more I get to know them. I’ve kept in touch with one or two from earlier tours, but it’s very difficult to keep in touch because there are so many couples. But when I do panto at Christmas, a lot of them come and visit me. I’ve had whole groups of them turn up from London! But to physically keep in touch with so many of them is difficult.

 

What about any less-favoured coach-trippers?
Yeah, it was one couple, two ladies, and one was a night club owner in London. And they arrived and I took them to lunch. She started ordering double vodkas, and I said she couldn’t do that, she could order a beer or a glass of wine, but she needed to be sober for the vote. So we had a row about her alcohol consumption. I think she lasted a day, and then left of her own volition. She said it wasn’t the tour she wanted to be on. So they decided to leave. I don’t think they really knew what the show was about, I think they just thought they could waltz round Europe on a coach, drinking vodka.