The first few episodes of this adaptation of Beth O’Leary’s novel feature zero chemistry between the leads. It’s one for fans of the genre only

The easiest way to describe The Road Trip would be to call it the TV equivalent of an airport novel. Perhaps that is because it is. Beth O’Leary has long kept the WH Smith industrial complex alive, with bestselling novels including The Flatshare, which sold more than 1m copies. That book was adapted into a six-part TV series in 2022, and followed two roommates thrust together by the fact that they rented the same bed – cleverly twisting the hellscape that is the London rental market into the stuff of a fluffy romcom. This one follows Dylan and Addie, a pair of exes thrust together by the fact that they have to use the same method of transport to get to a wedding 1,000 miles away. Like a rat, a potential love affair is never more than 6ft away in O’Leary’s world.

This time, our star-crossed, claustrophobic pairing are Dylan and Addie, who are on their separate ways to the wedding of their friends Cherry and Krish. In the book, the nuptials were in Scotland. But this is TV, so it has been relocated to lush, mountainous Spain. Addie and her sister Deb – plus an uninvited guest named Rodney – are driving in a camper van from Bristol to catch a cross-channel ferry. Up the road, Dylan and his best mate, Marcus, are on their way to the airport, in a Porsche. Marcus (David Jonsson), in a role with shades of his much-missed Industry character Gus) crashes the Porsche – his dad’s – into Addie’s camper van. Although the RV sounded like a dying animal long before that, it becomes Dylan and Marcus’s only hope for getting across the border, leaving our fivesome lumped together.