It’s emotional, and heartfelt and funny...
ROB RINDER AND RYLAN CLARK TALK TO LAURA HARDING ABOUT THEIR ADVENTURES IN EUROPE AHEAD OF THEIR NEW BBC TRAVEL SHOW
TV favourites Robert Rinder and Rylan Clark are old pals but stark opposites when it comes to cultural taste.
But the duo will put their differences aside for an epic tour around Europe for their new BBC series, in which they follow in the footsteps of the 19th-century romantic poet Lord Byron and other grand tourists of the time.
While TV barrister and former Strictly Come Dancing star Rob, 45, is a fan of opera and poetry, Rylan, 35, star of shows ranging from This Morning, to Strictly: It Takes Two, to Celebrity Gogglebox and his Radio 2 show; admits he is more of a newcomer in the world of the arts.
But they will both immerse themselves in the art, culture and wild behaviour of the ultimate Brits abroad trip, while sharing some tender and personal moments over Aperol spritzes following tumultuous periods in their personal lives.
They begin their journey in Venice, where they try out glassblowing, track down one of the largest paintings on canvas in the world and don drag for a trip down the city’s Grand Canal.
Ahead of the first episode, they talk about embarking on an adventure together.
Rob gave me that gift, to understand that art is genuinely for everyone Rylan Clark
Why did you want to do the series?
RC: For money. I’m joking. Definitely not, not at the BBC. Me and Rob have been mates for years. And we knew that we were the unlikely lads, we were complete opposites.
But actually, we’ve got a lot of similarities in experiences we’ve been through, especially recently. And it was just an interesting concept of Rob showing me his world and me showing him mine, so the fact that we were both almost thrown in at the deep end, we didn’t really know what the show was gonna be.
I think a lot of people, when the show was announced, were like, “oh great, another travelogue” but after you’ve watched it, you realise it’s not a travelogue, it’s something that we’ve never really seen before on TV.
It’s sort of a mixture of the educational side of it, but not in a snobby way, but also the realness of it all, it’s actually quite emotional, and heartfelt and funny, which is quite rare for a lot of shows these days.
RR: I am fascinated and obsessed by art, and by sharing it with the broadest possible groups of communities imaginable. The idea that I can’t stand is that there’s one community that owns great art, great music... and trying to explode this dreadful idea that’s increasingly restricting horizons, especially of young people, the idea everybody staying in a lane.
So I wanted to be part of an arts programme that was absolutely going to empower people to look at art and music and take back the pen of the story that people have written on their behalf and go, as long as I’m
culturally curious, I get to write my own story.
It struck me that this was a really beautiful way of doing it along the lines of the grand tour and in conjunction with the idea of following some of the ideas of Byron, and the reason why he left in order to go and have the completion of an education: aesthetic, spiritual, and intellectual.
You both have different approaches to travelling, what did you learn from each other?
RC: Rob gave me such an amazing gift. I hate bigging him up but I do love him... he has opened my eyes up.
I say very openly on the show that I’ve always felt that art’s not my lane, it’s not for me, people like me shouldn’t be moseying around the Uffizi (gallery in Florence).
But Rob gave me that gift, to understand that art is genuinely for everyone and it is exactly what you make of it.
The artist has got their vision, and they make of their own creations what they want, but you, as the admirer of that art, make of it what you want to make of it.
So, something that Rob might look at, and believe is the dawning of a new day, I might look at it as the sunset of an old life. You make of it what you will. And I’ll be forever grateful to Rob, because he’s taken me to places that if I was in Venice, Florence or Rome, I would never have stepped foot in.
We see you have some quite emotional chats talking about your life experiences, why do you think it’s important to show those kind of candid conversations?
RC: I think it’s really healthy that friends, have that conversation. I think people are bored of celebrities and people on TV trying to be like, “oh, I’m perfect. Everything’s great. Listen to us, we know it’s tough out there... but you hang in there guys”.
But we’re real people, we’re normal working class blokes that have done alright in life.
You look at Rob and think he’s come from middle England, and he’s like the Dowager Lady Edgar the Third, but he’s not, he comes from a working class family [he’s] a cabbie’s son.
It’s the same with me, we come from working class families and things going wrong. We’ve both been through divorces.
We had very different experiences with the divorces, mine wasn’t great, Rob’s wasn’t great, no divorce is great.
But you know what? We’ve got to find ourselves just as much as the next fella along the road, just because he puts a wig on and he makes out to be a judge every now and again and I sit there doing a bit of karaoke on a Saturday afternoon, doesn’t mean everything’s all roses.
We went into this saying we don’t want this to be your travelogue, your glossy entertainment show, we want it to be a real show and this is exactly what we would discuss if me and Rob were sitting in Venice having an Aperol Spritz.
Rob and Rylan’s Grand Tour starts on May 12 at 9pm on BBC2
EGGS have somehow become synonymous with the millennial phenomenon that is brunch. But are scrambled eggs on sourdough really worth the money you’d pay at a café, or could you better master the art of egg-making at home?
In defence of restaurants, it’s really hard to make an egg dish that’s worth the money they need to charge to keep an establishment running, says cook, writer and content creator Ed Smith. But eggs are the ultimate “quick and nourishing” ingredient for a home-cooked meal – not to mention cheap.
And if you have forked out cash for an upmarket brunch, the stakes are higher. “You know when you get that poached egg and you cut into it and the yolk doesn’t move anywhere? That is, I think, one of the more disappointing things in life,” says the 42-yearold Londoner.
Even with the huge rise in places serving up poached eggs or shakshuka for £12 a pop, Ed says: “There are not many places I’d rather eat an egg than in my own house.”
And with a bit of encouragement, and a few out-of-the-box egg ideas, most people would agree, he reckons.
Ed, who made his name with the blog and social account Rocket &
Squash and left his corporate law job working 60-80 hours a week in 2012 to pursue food, first started experimenting with eggs more when his son was a baby.
“I tended to have what I would call a second breakfast after having been up for a few hours. I’m sitting there trying to occupy my child while I’m letting my wife sleep and I found myself slightly embellishing eggs.”
Eggs are, after all, usually always in most people’s kitchens. “It’s a great way to clear out the cupboards of all the ingredients that you buy for other recipes,” he says, and they became a staple of his working lunch during lockdown and the years of working from home since.
It’s only fitting then that Ed’s fourth cookbook is called Good Eggs – featuring no less than 100 different recipes celebrating the
humble ingredient but with some elevation – like kimchi and gochujang skillet eggs, sausage laab and fried egg bun and za’atar-dusted fudgy-yolked eggs. “It’s not about eggs as an ingredient, but eggs as a centrepiece,” he says.
“Eggs are personal,” he concedes, but they don’t need to be boring.
“If you want to have eggs over easy with an extremely hard yolk, then that’s totally fine, but do consider putting chilli oil on and having it with a paratha rather than white bread.”
One of the major mistakes people make when making brunch at home is attempting eggs for big groups of people, he says.
“I don’t think that you should cook eggs for more than three other people at the same time.
“As soon as you start multiplying it beyond about four people, it becomes chaotic.”
To counteract this, Ed has specific recipes that cater for groups – think group shakshuka or traybaked frittata baguettes with minted feta salad.
Ed’s book is peppered with helpful tips and tricks for the cooking process. For perfectly scrambled soft, oozy eggs, Ed suggests cooking them very gently over a low-medium heat.
“Stir constantly, encouraging very small curds to form as the eggs thicken. Remove from the heat before they are ‘done’,” he writes. If you sense they’re about to overcook, or your other elements aren’t ready yet, transfer to a cold bowl.
Boiled eggs must be the most under-appreciated form of cooked egg, though. “If you ever see a dippy egg, you know, getting an egg in a cup brings back a kind of visceral childhood joy for a lot of people.”
His no-fuss method is room temperature, medium-sized eggs in a saucepan of just-boiling water – and simmer for four minutes and 30 seconds for eggs so soft that they must be left unpeeled and dipped into in the shell instead, or seven minutes for a jammy consistency (45 seconds longer for ‘fudgy’).
Exactly how fresh an egg is determines how it should best be cooked. “You will never get a good poached egg if that egg is not really fresh,” Ed says. The best way to determine freshness is to put it in a glass of water. According to Ed, the fresher the egg, the smaller the air pocket and the less it floats.
“The colour of the yolk comes from the chicken breed and what they eat,” says Ed. “It often involves paprika or something in their feed, which is not a secret.”
Sometimes those eggs also taste better, he reckons. “But that might be a placebo effect, or it might be a close correlation to the fact that the eggs, the farm or the company that has got those bright egg yolks is probably also treating its chickens in a nice way,” Ed says.
“It’s such a joy to open a really bright vibrant orange yolk, it’s like sunshine pouring onto the plate.”
I don’t think that you should cook eggs for more than three other people