Bennett Arron: How Anthony Hopkins has lit up our lives

I recently watched Sir Anthony's latest film The Father. It was one of the most incredible performances I have seen. I managed to obtain an email address for Sir Anthony and wrote to him.

Rob Brydon interview

"I showed that to Anthony Hopkins, me impersonating him, when I was in LA recently and it was bizarre to see him watching it on a laptop and laughing away."

Fabulous Helen Mirren takes her place on the Norton sofa tonight to talk up her new film, Hitchcock. She's been nominated for a Bafta for her role as the director's long-suffering wife, Alma Reville, opposite Anthony Hopkins as the Master of Suspense.

Mirren is teetering dangerously close to becoming, like her fellow Dame, Judi Dench, a national treasure - she's funny, never appears to take herself too seriously and is a super-fantastic actress who played the best EVER television detective, Jane Tennison in all of those Prime Suspects.

Keeping her company is the underrated, hugely brilliant comic actor Paul Rudd, who can make any ropey old movie (have you seen The Object of My Affection?) seem not so bad after all. He's in London promoting his new film, This Is 40, Judd Apatow's sequel to Knocked Up.

All anyone really wants from Steve Coogan is Alan Partridge. And the fact that he knows it, that Norwich's finest swings like a comedy albatross around his neck, underpins the arch air of knowing antagonism he brings to The Trip (BBC2). Here's an anti-comedy if ever there was one.

Featuring Coogan and Rob Brydon playing heightened versions of themselves (their description), The Trip wilfully blurs fact and fiction as this mismatched pair, Brydon's innate amiability crossing verbal swords with Coogan's surly ego, set off on a restaurant review tour of the rural north of England on behalf of a Sunday magazine. It's a perfect set-up, egotistical and pointless, given neither of them knows much about food, which fuels a subtle meander around the oxbow lake of celebrity ego.

Coogan brutally sends up his image with a performance that's so deeply dislikeable you end up admiring his ability to be so sublimely cussed.

'I don't want to do British TV - I want to do films, good films,' he whines to his agent on the phone and, even though you know it's an exercise in fiction and not reality TV, it does feel, well, real.

It's a bumpy trip and no mistake. The laughs are of the dark and despairing kind, built mainly around the pair of them sat at a restaurant table battering each other with impressions, like Ultimate Cage Fighter played out by the voices of Michael Caine and Anthony Hopkins. It's a send-up but it's tongue-in-spleen rather than tongue-in-cheek.

There's a slightly irksome air of self-congratulation but it's hard to take against a show where Coogan chooses Joy Division's Atmosphere ('don't walk away... in silence') as the perfect soundtrack for cruising through the verdant English landscape. Makes a change from The Lark Ascending, that's for sure.