There were a couple of blokes off Hollyoaks or Casualty or something whose names I forget Richard Blackwood who used to be

There were a couple of blokes off Hollyoaks or Casualty or something whose names I forget, Richard Blackwood, who used to be on telly, Phil Cornwell, who turns up doing impressions on Dead Ringers and was in the excellent Stella Street and , er, that was it. Despite some trepidation about hitching along with Gascoigne and Five Bellies at 100mph+ it seemed a reasonably entertaining line up They didn’t turn up None of them did. Very pretty, but their role on the trip always seemed slightly ambiguous to me. In the publicity material I received before the trip from the PR agency I was informed that the celebrities that had been lined up included “Paul Whitehouse, John Thompson, Paul Gascoigne and his pal Jimmy Five Bellies and Goldie Lookin Chain in their Burberry chav mobile”.

The car’s paintwork didn’t survive unscathed as one of his minders managed to scrape it while showing off to the “Bikini Bandits”. He had a loud Lambo with a spangly yellow paint job featuring his own face. I would have liked a few plucky little 2CVs or old Beetles or a Fiat 500. For such cars doing 3,000 miles in a week would be a real challenge: it just isn’t for a brand new hire car Neither were the celebrities the stuff of dreams The biggest was Dennis Rodman Who? A very rich, very famous basketball player.

Various other supercars, notably a Mercedes McLaren SLR joined for maybe a leg or two of the run. Less impressive, but welcome all the same, were a Chrysler 300C, a Jaguar XK8, an Audi A8 and some Mercedes SLKs and CLKs, but, without wishing to sound too hoity-toity they are hardly the stuff of dreams. I was also pleased to see one of the new model Rolls-Royce Phantoms long for the ride, a new Corvette, old and new Mustang, some sort of 1930s hot rod and an Aston Martin. Now, I’m not really that big a fan of the Italian exotica, to be truthful, but I was still impressed by the array of Lamborghinis and Ferraris on the route.