Monte Carlo Or Bust (ITV1, 9pm); How to Get a Head in Sculpture (BBC4, 9pm).

THE celebrity jaunt Monte Carlo Or Bust sees three couples on a road trip from London to Monte Carlo with the aim of discovering “the genius, glory and grub” of France.

Paired up to embark on this travel adventure are Jack Dee and Ade Edmondson, in a VW camper van, Jodie Kidd and Julian Clary, in a Bentley convertible and Penny Smith and Rory McGrath, in a union flag-bedecked Mini Cooper.

The couples are competing against each other to discover what makes our closest neighbour tick.

As their journeys unfold taking in the stunning French countryside, winding around breath-taking mountains and cruising along the coastal roads, they’re tasked with collecting a total of three items that best represent the head, heart and stomach of each of the regions they are passing through.

Clary liked the idea of “a bit of an adventure”

and being with Jodie Kidd, whom he likes and gets on with, and driving a Bentley.

“We were both on the Strictly Come Dancing live arena tour together a couple of years ago and she’s just really good fun.

She’s very extroverted and loud, and also very knowledgeable about places and things and a bit of an alpha woman, which I quite like,” he says.

“She knows her own mind and she’s beautiful as well, aesthetically pleasing.

I think a lot depended on that. Obviously, in a car eight hours a day together, had I been with Ann Widdecombe it might have been a different story.”

He normally drives a Lexus and owns up to knowing nothing about cars.

“There were all these gadgets and adjustments on the seats and the sound system was extraordinary,” he recalls.

“We did stop somewhere once in a lay-by with the roof down and Jodie put some of her clubbing music and danced on the back seat and you must have been able to hear it about ten miles away.”

The journey made him change his mind about France. “I’ve always dismissed France as being too close to be an exciting destination and I didn’t know much about it. Now I’ve realised how stunning some of the countryside is, Provence especially,”

he says.

“I’ve always thought it was a place that middle class English people go, and indeed it is, but you can see why. The French are very rude in Paris. I’d forgotten about that, very arrogant and dismissive. Jodie had a few run-ins with lorry drivers.

“It was definitely exciting and a step into the unknown and I liked the finding of the tasks that made us go to places we wouldn’t have otherwise gone.”

Along the way, they got drunk on pear cider at a farm. “It was very strong and we got very loud, or Jodie got very loud,” says Clary.

“Driving through the South of France with the roof down and Jodie, with her Hermes scarf flapping in the wind, did feel as if I was in a glamorous film or something, down the winding roads.

Presumably some of the people they met en route have stuck in his mind. “Yes the man with the Citroen 2CV business, and that funny farmer, he was a scream.”

HOW To Get a Head in Sculpture considers how the greatest figures in world sculpture have continually turned to the head to re-evaluate what it means to be human and to reformulate how closely sculpture can capture it.

In this documentary actor David Thewlis has his head sculpted by three different sculptors, while the Archbishop of Canterbury Dr Rowan Williams, artist Maggi Hambling and writer Ben Okri discuss art’s most enduring preoccupation – ourselves.