Financed by a bet with a Yeovil linen draper, court jester Thomas Coryate`s 1608 journey to Venice & back was an unlikely template for the Grand Tour. Almost four hundred years later, Tim Moore put on a ridiculous velvet suit & set off in Coryate`s tracks at the wheel of a senile Rolls-Royce. Treading on frugality & the bawdy self-indulgence of the later Grand Tourists, Moore`s confrontations with Continental croupiers, nudists, sugar-beer farmers & an offshore welders are a grotesque blend of Baldrick & Blackadder. While charting the decline of the Grand Tour from the sombre academy of cultural betterment to the Club 18-30 of the 1830s, Moore also resurrects the reputation of Coryate, whose reward for introducing the fork to Britain & coining the word `umbrella` was ridicule, poverty & an almost unbearably poignant ending in India.