It has become fashionable to dunk on the celebrity travelogue in recent times and often with good reason. For every Rob and Rylan’s Grand Tour (good), there is an Alison & Larry: Billericay to Barry (awful). Invariably they come across as indulgent jollies that reveal little about either the celebs or the places they visit.
But Dame Judi and Jay: The Odd Couple proved a shining beacon of just how successful it can be if you get the right two people talking to each other at the right time and in the right place. Dame Judi Dench and Jay Blades met three years ago when the acting legend appeared on his BBC programme The Repair Shop . They became, Dench says, “the very best of friends” despite their differences.
She was born in 1934 in York into a theatre-loving family, moved to London to study drama and rose to become one of the greatest actors the country has ever seen. In 1970, the same year she received her OBE, Blades was born in east London, a child of the Windrush generation who spent time in a homeless refuge with his single mum, and whose work as a furniture restorer unexpectedly led him to the world of TV. The Odd Couple saw the pair visiting the places that were most important to them in a bid to understand one another better.
While Blades took Dench (or as he calls her “The Dame”) to Ridley Road Market and his old youth centre in Hackney, she took him to her former home in Stratford-upon-Avon and the Old Vic theatre where her career began. The gentle no-fril.