IT TAKES time for Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon to settle back into normality after filming The Trip.
In the Sky One travelogue series, the comedians and friends play exaggerated versions of themselves, who venture around the world reviewing restaurants together. The latest instalment – the fourth – sees the pair head to Greece.
"There's a real period of adjustment when you come back and slot into your family again," says Swansea-born Brydon (54).
Having a camera crew around all the time makes Coogan, also 54, become "slightly childlike".
"You can think, 'I'll just walk across this road, because if there's a car coming someone else will stop it'," quips the actor, who grew up in Middleton – a suburban town north of Manchester.
"So, when you get back to real life, you realise when you cross the road you have to look both ways. Things like that really do happen to you. You get up in the morning and think, 'What do I do now?' It's up to you, you're a grown up!"
The first episode starts at the site of ancient Troy in western Turkey. They then head to the Temple of Athena in Assos before travelling on a private boat to Lesvos, where they visit the Moria refugee camp.
"We're mimicking Homer's Odyssey, which is the trip of Odysseus from Troy to Ithaca," says Coogan. "People weren't sure for hundreds of years whether Troy was mythical and about 100 years ago they discovered it was real.
"Though of course The Odyssey is a fictional book as it has gods in it and anyone who has half a brain knows that gods don't exist... Just throwing a bit of controversy in there! I know most people think there's one."
The duo behave just as you'd expect them to; they naturally bounce off one another, and there's rarely a quiet moment during our chat.
"We try to avoid the places that most tourists go when they visit Greece," Coogan continues.
"I wasn't expecting the greenery," says Brydon. "It's a beautifully verdant, lush country."
He adds that when filming the show they "always have fun".
"We have breakfast together, film all day, have dinner together, so we spend a lot of time with each other. It is intense, but in a good way. It's quite unusual at our age to spend that much time with a friend. We go on these trips and they're curated so we get the best of everywhere we go.
"It's all arranged, we don't have to think about anything. We close our bags in the hotel room and they're in the next one."
"It's like a school trip with a crew," jokes Coogan. "And we're the star pupils."
The show is improvised "in as much as Michael [Winterbottom, director] provides the frame, the skeleton," explains Coogan, who has one grown-up daughter. "It's his idea where we go, that it's Odysseus – and he'll put in themes he wants us to discuss.
"It's not all made up, but as long as we tick certain boxes we can talk about what we like. So we will invent things. Sometimes Rob and I will be chatting off camera and he'll say, 'Why don't we talk about that on camera?' He might say, 'I'll say this, and you can say this about me'. So Rob might give me a line at his expense, and vice versa. All we're interested in is trying to make it interesting and funny."
Because they play semi-fictionalised versions of themselves, there have been cases of fans confusing fact and fiction.
"In The Trip To Italy my 'Rob' has a moment of madness and spends the night with a deckhand," recollects father-of-five Brydon.
"This went out on BBC2 and the next day my wife Clare was taking one of our kids to school and in all seriousness the teacher came out and said, 'This must be a very difficult time for you'.
"She must have thought she was watching a fly-on-the-wall documentary which I had allowed into my bedroom to see me getting out of bed the next morning and looking a little, 'What the hell have I done?!'"
:: The Trip To Greece launches on Sky One on Tuesday March 3.