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Miriam Margolyes and Alan Cumming return with 'Lost in Scotland and Beyond'

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Miriam Margolyes and Alan Cumming are heading back out on the road for a new travel series — this time swapping Scotland for California.

Picking up from the success of their series Lost in Scotland that saw the actors explore their Scottish roots by travelling around in a campervan, the new Channel 4 series Miriam & Alan: Lost in Scotland and Beyond will feature them in their other mutual home, the US West Coast.

Read more: Harry Potter star Miriam Margolyes calls abuse aimed at JK Rowling over trans debate 'misplaced'

The series begins with them back in Scotland meeting a range of fascinating characters once again, before they swap their campervan for a supersized RV and head for the stunning California coastline to reconnect with people and places from their early years making a career in Hollywood.

Margolyes will show Cumming the apartment on Ocean Avenue that she lived in for 16 years, as well as seeking out her old synagogue, while Cumming introduces her to his old friends and favourite haunts on the coastline between Los Angeles and San Francisco.

Cumming said: “I can’t wait to get the show on the road again! Driving round my homeland with a potty mouthed octogenarian was one of the most joyous months I’ve ever had, and I’m so glad that joy translated on to the screen.

Read more: David Baddiel and Louis Theroux to explore anti-Semitism in Channel 4 documentary

"So to do it again and to explore California as well seems almost too much of a carry on!”

Margolyes added: "I thought I'd experienced almost everything, but being driven around Scotland with Mr Cumming was such a delightful new pleasure I can't wait to repeat it.

"He is funny, kind and wise — and together we laughed and marvelled and remembered. It will be a joy to get going again; I hope I've got some surprises left to tickle his fancy."

The pair are set to share more laughs and outrageous moments living in close quarters as they relive past memories in special places from their lives.

An air date is yet to be announced for Miriam & Alan: Lost in Scotland and Beyond .

Watch: Phil and Holly crack up as Miriam Margolyes breaks wind

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Miriam Margolyes & Alan Cumming return to Channel 4 to get Lost in Scotland and Beyond

“TV’s new golden odd couple” -  The Guardian

“My heart usually sinks if I see the words ‘a celebrity goes to Scotland’, but this was terrific” -  Sunday Times

“In the pantheon of celebrity road trips, this is among the superior versions" -  Financial Times

Following a successful first outing for ‘TV’s new golden odd couple,’ Hollywood actors Miriam Margolyes and Alan Cumming are back behind the campervan wheel as their rip-roaring road trip antics continue across Scotland… and beyond.

Miriam & Alan: Lost in Scotland and Beyond (4x60’), produced by Blink Films, will follow the pair as they take in some of Scotland’s most spectacular and far-flung locations before they journey across the pond to their other mutual home, the American West Coast – a place that has shaped both of their lives.

Our dynamic duo will kick off their journey in Scotland, once again meeting a range of quirky and unexpected characters and there’ll certainly be a few surprises in store for both Miriam and Alan.

The next part of their adventure finds the pair swap their campervan for a supersized RV – much to Miriam’s delight – as they take in the sights of the stunning California coastline and reconnect with people and places from this amazing chapter in their lives.

Miriam wastes no time in whisking Alan right off to the apartment where she lived for 16 transformative years, on the palm-lined Ocean Avenue, seeking out her old synagogue and reliving her first encounters in Hollywood.  Alan delights in introducing her to some of his favourite haunts and closest friends, as they take in the glorious coastline from Los Angeles to San Francisco.

Throughout their journey, the duo will deliver their unique brand of banter, storytelling and antics as they travel to places packed with memories and personal connections, that mix the funny and outrageous with the poignant.

Alan Cumming: “I can’t wait to get the show on the road again! Driving round my homeland with a potty mouthed octogenarian was one of the most joyous months I’ve ever had, and I’m so glad that joy translated on to the screen. So to do it again and to explore California as well seems almost too much of a carry on!”

Miriam Margolyes: "I thought I'd experienced almost everything, but being driven around Scotland with Mr. Cumming, was such a delightful new pleasure I can't wait to repeat it. He is funny, kind and wise - and together we laughed and marvelled and remembered. It will be a joy to get going again; I hope I've got some surprises left to tickle his fancy."

Deborah Dunnett, Commissioning Editor for Features and Daytime at Channel 4: “ What a pair! I can’t wait for them to unleash more skeletons from deep within their closets.”

Laura Jones, Creative Director at Blink Films and Executive Producer: "What a blast to be back on the road again with this delightful pair!    Series 2 promising   more surprises, joy and jockstrap obsession as they get lost in far-flung Scotland and the Californian coast .”

Miriam & Alan: Lost in Scotland and Beyond was commissioned for Channel 4 by Deborah Dunnett, Commissioning Editor for Features & Daytime. The 4x60’ series is made by Blink Films; a Tin Roof Media company and the Executive Producer is Laura Jones.

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Miriam Margolyes & Alan Cumming’s Friendship Goes Way Back

The pair have joined forces on a new show that sees them road-trip around Scotland.

Miriam Margolyes and Alan Cumming have taken holidaying in the UK to a whole new level, renting out a motorhome in Scotland’s Highlands and inviting Channel 4 and their fans. Miriam and Alan: Lost in Scotland premiered on Channel 4 on Nov. 16 but how did the two acting icons meet? Their roots run deep in Scotland and the pair have been showbiz pals for decades.

Miriam and Alan: Lost in Scotland opened in Glasgow where Margolyes and Cumming revealed they both have shared family history. However, they can’t quite remember where they first met.

When asked how they know each other Cumming told Channel 4, “Well we can’t quite remember exactly! It must have been in the early nineties because I shot this film with Ian Holm about FR Leavis ( The Last Romantics ) and that was who Miriam was taught by at Cambridge. At some point around that time, I was with Ian and we chatted to you [Margolyes] about FR Leavis so that was probably the first time, but we’ve met a lot over the years at various backstage things.”

He continued: “We’re sort of like showbiz friends who meet over the years at various things and can’t quite place it. I shot that film in 1991 so it’s been a long time ago!”

However, the pair can pinpoint the exact moment the idea for Lost In Scotland was born. Margolyes revealed that it came to her during an appearance on The Graham Norton Show . The pair shared the sofa that night with Daniel Radcliffe, Sharon Horgan, and Craig David. They had undeniably chaotic chemistry and Cumming said, “I’d been talking to Blink Films (the production company behind the series) about doing something about Scotland. They suggested perhaps I did it with someone else, so I suggested Miriam as I thought we’d make a good oddball couple! And then they had the idea of the van and it all went from there.”

In the series, the pair visit Cumming’s mum and family home where he speaks openly about his childhood growing up with an abusive father. Margolyes also sees the neighbourhood where her grandparents settled after they left Belarus to escape persecution. It was the place that her father grew up. They also tick eating Haggis, meeting Gaelic singers, and scaling Glencoe off their Scottish bucket list.

Travelling with a friend can be a little tense at times but Margolyes revealed that they enjoyed in so much they’d happily do it again. “I felt like I was on holiday with a glorious companion. It was delightful and I would do it again in a shot,” she said. “We could go anywhere you’d like. Let’s go somewhere we don’t know – let’s go to Tallinn or somewhere like Kentucky.”

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Miriam's Big American Adventure

• TV Mini Series

Actress Miriam Margolyes embarks upon a road trip through the heartlands of middle America, from Chicago to New Orleans, to meet some of the people whose voices and votes are reshaping the n... Read all Actress Miriam Margolyes embarks upon a road trip through the heartlands of middle America, from Chicago to New Orleans, to meet some of the people whose voices and votes are reshaping the nation. Actress Miriam Margolyes embarks upon a road trip through the heartlands of middle America, from Chicago to New Orleans, to meet some of the people whose voices and votes are reshaping the nation.

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• Miriam Margolyes
• Candace Collins
• 4 User reviews

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• Feb 15, 2019
• January 3, 2018 (United Kingdom)
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Miriam’s Big American Adventure

Fresh from The Real Marigold on Tour, Miriam Margolyes embarks on a road trip through middle America

Fresh from The Real Marigold on Tour, actress Miriam Margolyes embarks on a road trip through middle America. It’s not merely a celebration of all things USA, though.

Starting in Chicago, Miriam’s introduced to former Playboy Bunny Candace Jordan, who takes her to a glittering social event. But, eager to witness the side of the city that exists away from high society, Miriam then visits its most dangerous project to meet a former gang member.

Later, she visits Indianapolis for a mass citizenship ceremony, asking why people from other countries still want to become Americans in an era of political volatility.

This programme airs in Scotland at 10.45pm.

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This Much Is True by Miriam Margolyes review – a wickedly honest memoir

With her naughty stories and cutting remarks, the comic actor spares no blushes – but her account is poignant too

I ’m quite sure you picked up this book hoping I’d make you laugh,” Miriam Margolyes writes in her memoir, This Much Is True. She more than delivered. When I was reading it this book on a train, a stranger asked if I was OK because I was crying with laughter at Margolyes’s description of her interview to study English literature at Oxford (“‘Do you like Milton?’ the tutor barked. I did like Milton and could honestly say so. ‘DAMN GOOD POET,’ she boomed, slapping her thigh like a principal boy in pantomime. This convinced me Somerville College would not be the place for me”), and then, many decades later, acclimatising to global fandom after playing Professor Sprout in the Harry Potter films (“Usually when Jews are mobbed in Lithuania, it’s to kill them, but this was because of Harry Potter”). And, of course, there’s the sex. “I am now better known for my naughty stories than almost anything else,” she writes, a little regretfully, although that then sparks a thought about the hilarity of penises (“Such an odd dangler to have”).

Margolyes is one of Britain’s most prolific actors, whose career began with the Cambridge Footlights in one of its more legendary phases, not that she has any sentimentality about it. She was the only girl in the show and the boys showed her “studied cruelty”: John Cleese , Bill Oddie and Graham Chapman were “total shits,” she writes. “My dislike of that whole, largely male, world of comedy has never left me.” The Footlights lot “thought I was a jumped-up, pushy, overconfident, fat little Jew”.

She never needed them anyway. She worked her way through radio, voiceovers, drama and then Hollywood, winning a Bafta for her performance in Martin Scorsese’s The Age of Innocence. Yet, she is probably best known – certainly to younger generations – for her recent turns on talkshows, shocking the hosts and fellow guests with her tales of licentiousness. “Jesus, Miriam!” one guest shouted, after she recalled the time she gave a handjob to a soldier she discovered masturbating in a tree in Edinburgh. “You’ve got to support the troops,” Margolyes replied. She has become a regular on Graham Norton, who, rightly, finds her an absolute hoot.

But I have had mixed feelings about Margolyes’s talkshow appearances. Partly because, as she says, they have a tendency to overshadow her work, which really has been magnificent (I was especially pleased that her brilliantly weird performance in Kenneth Branagh’s 1991 film, Dead Again, gets a mention in the memoir.) But also because it sometimes feels as if she’s reducing herself to parody, playing the overweight older lesbian who talks – ooh! – about sex. Margolyes is aware of this concern and sweeps it away: “Not a lot of gay women front up on TV, so I hope I give courage to young dykes to be proud and confident. If you tell the truth – and I always do – you shame the devil.” She certainly does, although some of her fellow actors – William Hurt (“an arsehole”), Glenda Jackson (“horrid”), Leonardo DiCaprio (“quite nasty in his keenness to get away” from Claire Danes) – would probably prefer more discretion. Readers, however, wouldn’t want it any other way. In some cases, it is a mystery how she got her manuscript past the lawyers. In one aside, she claims that the 42-year-old cellist Jacqueline du Pré died by assisted suicide instead of – as her death certificate states – multiple sclerosis. Friends of Du Pré have cast doubt on Margolyes’s claim and her widowed husband, conductor Daniel Barenboim, told the Daily Mail “it has nothing to do with the reality of Jackie’s passing”. Margolyes, for her part, said in an interview with the Observer that she felt it was her “duty” to tell the story.

She was born in 1941, the adored only child of second-generation Jewish immigrants. Her mother had a fear of childbirth, so when she discovered she was pregnant, she tried to have an abortion. “But it was against the law and no one would do it. So she held on to me and never, for the rest of her life, let me go,” Margolyes writes. Her childhood was blissful and her memories of it and of her university life are my favourite sections of the book: lyrical, natural and shoulder-shakingly hilarious. At Cambridge, she was determined to make an impact and so smoked a pipe and arrived at breakfast every morning with the announcement: “I have just had a wonderful bowel movement!”

Despite becoming renowned for her blowjobs (“It didn’t matter whose penis was in my mouth, it was all grist to the mill”), she “formally became a lesbian” in 1966 and quickly fell in love with Heather, an academic, who remains her partner 53 years later. Yet one of her big regrets is coming out to her parents, as she believes it sparked her mother’s stroke. One of the book’s real merits is Margolyes’s refusal to mould her story to the usual celebrity narratives: being honest about herself only hurt her parents and, by extension, her; she sees no positives in her lifelong struggle with her weight; getting old sucks. But also, she refuses to be miserable about any of it. Despite all the talk about penises and celebrity prats, The main impression readers are left with is of her kindness. The friends she sweeps up along the way are friends for life, and as a result she has 11,833 names in her phone, and I dearly wish mine was among them. She and I would disagree about Israel, of which she is very much not a fan, and she knows fellow Jews get cross with her about that. But as she says: “How can I not be controversial? It’s like my parents not wanting me to be a lesbian.” A French teacher had her bang to rights: “You were naughty, Miriam, but you were never wicked.”

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As her American road trip gets under way on TV, Miriam Margolyes admits... 'The best bit about the USA? They sent me to jail!'

• Miriam Margolyes is embarking on an epic road trip through middle America 
• It is part of a new BBC1 documentary called Miriam’s Big American Adventure
• Among the places she visited for the show was a women’s prison in Ohio

By Miriam Margolyes For Mail On Sunday

Published: 17:02 EDT, 6 January 2018 | Updated: 17:02 EDT, 6 January 2018

View comments

In her new BBC1 series Miriam’s Big American Adventure, the actress – who played Professor Sprout in the Harry Potter films – embarks on an epic road trip through the heartlands of middle America. 

This latest journey follows her appearance on The Real Marigold Hotel and, more recently, The Real Marigold Hotel On Tour which took her to China , Cuba, Florida and Japan.

I lived in Santa Monica in California for 16 years but I knew that it didn’t really represent the ‘real’ America. With the election of President Trump , it is a very peculiar time in the States and I thought it would be interesting to see what it, and the people, were like now – and to find out why President Trump was elected.

Miriam inside a women's prison in Ohio, where she met some of the inmates. It was part of her new BBC1 show where she is taking a road trip across America 

My new three-part TV series is a road trip from Chicago to New Orleans, but it’s not really a travel programme, it’s more sociological.

I see a lot of places that I’d never been to before, but the programme is really about the people I meet. It’s the opposite of ‘Marigold’ which was really a travel programme. This time my favourite place was the inside of a jail!

I realise that this series, coming hard on the heels of ‘Marigold’, means that I’m on the TV quite a lot at the moment – people are going to get very sick of me.

I’m technically an actor, but I’ve done documentaries. One of my favourites was the programme I made 12 years ago about going around America in the footsteps of Charles Dickens.

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I also loved doing ‘Marigold’ because I liked the people I was travelling with and, you know, you can’t believe that you’re being paid to go on holiday.

I really enjoyed our time in India – partly because we stayed there longer than the other places we visited. If I looked as if I wasn’t enjoying China, it was because we didn’t stay there long enough to visit the really interesting bits and get to know people, so that was probably the least successful visit, but I still enjoyed it very much.

Miriam with a female biker in New Orleans. She travelled across the American heartlands for her tour 

Actually I just love travelling: it’s wonderful to meet people and learn new things. I now realise you need to get out and travel while you still can. As you get older, it’s less easy – I don’t walk as well as I used to, and I can’t climb stairs very well, so the things I can do are somewhat limited now.

We didn’t travel much when I was a child, just to Glasgow and Broadstairs. My father was Scottish so we went there to see the family, and my mother had always gone to the Kent coast for her holidays and so we went there as well.

What I liked about doing my Big American Adventure was that I was travelling with a purpose, and when you do this you always have an interesting trip.

There were three highlights for me. One was going to a women’s prison in Ohio and meeting the inmates and talking to them and working with them, actually cleaning toilets with them, and understanding something of the horror of drug addiction, which I’ve never been familiar with before. America’s drug problem is an absolute epidemic.

Meeting Zena Stevens, a black woman sheriff in Texas, was also a highlight: she was an electrifying personality. I really hope she will stand for President one day. She was extraordinary.

Miriam's new three-part TV series is a road trip from Chicago, pictured, to New Orleans, but she describes it as a 'sociological programme' 

I also met an incredible female biker gang called the Caramel Curves in New Orleans.

A lot of the places I visited are probably not the sort of places that people would think of visiting on a holiday to America. Yet, funnily enough, Dickens always went to the jails, workhouses and the mental homes.

My next trip is to Australia where I’m going for two months: I am an Australian citizen and I have a home there in Robertson, a little town in New South Wales where they made the movie Babe about the little pig. In the film I was the voice of Fly, the mother dog.

I wanted to do that role because when I read the book, the very first line of Babe is: ‘This is the tale of an unprejudiced heart.’ As soon as you hear those words, you know that something different and good is about to be unfolded before you.

The place I’d still love to visit is Africa. I don’t really know anything about the vast continent but I’ve adopted three elephants in Kenya and I’d love to go to see them.

The only thing that will slow me down is if I don’t get offered work. But, at the moment, that’s not the case, and you just keep going.

• Miriam’s Big American Adventure is on Wednesday evenings at 9pm on BBC1.

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Part of the Daily Mail, The Mail on Sunday & Metro Media Group