Steve Coogan wears a Blancpain

Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon drive through Italy in a small convertible, eat at expensive restaurants, needle each other about whose career is going better, and trade dueling impressions of Michael Caine, Al Pacino, and Robert De Niro. That is The Trip to Italy, Michael Winterbottom's 2014 sequel to The Trip, with both men playing fictionalized versions of themselves. Winterbottom shot it as six hour-long television episodes and edited them into a feature, and Coogan and Brydon improvised most of the talk, so the film keeps slipping between documentary and performance.

On Coogan's wrist, through the meals and the driving, sits what looks like a Blancpain. That is as far as the evidence goes. No watch publication, brand archive, or auction house has ever pinned down the model, and the only thread connecting Coogan to the marque is a watch-forum aside, about a different role in a different film, that calls him a regular Blancpain wearer. It is a thin reed, and worth flagging rather than dressing up.

There is a small joke buried in the costuming. When the Guardian ran a piece on the film's holiday menswear, it singled out Coogan's Ray-Bans and his Birkenstocks and said nothing at all about the watch. Whatever is on his wrist, it was quiet enough that the people paid to notice clothes looked right past it.