Hey, let’s all move to Tuscany
Second Chance Summer: Tuscany (BBC2)
IDEALLY, I suppose, we would all live in Tuscany. We would get the plane to Pisa, and instead of wandering around those Tuscan hills for two weeks, we would stay there and we would never come back.
Which would create obvious issues of overcrowding and perhaps a few culture clashes, but thankfully we don’t have to deal with any of that, because most of us will probably never do it.
“Ideally,” is the key word here, ideally we would do all sorts of things, and yet we know that some people have thought it all through, and have actually made that ideal a reality — or, in the case of the protagonists in Second Chance Summer: Tuscany, a reality TV programme.
They’ve taken the concept of The Real Marigold Hotel, moved it from India to Italy, and replaced the Great British actors with Great British real-people, or at least as real as it can get, within the parameters of a six-part BBC2 series.
Of course they’ve been coming to Tuscany for a long time, the Brits, it has been a much-loved destination for the more cultured types, as against the vulgarians who just want to be baked slowly into oblivion on the Costa del Sol. And it is a mark of how far Paddy has come on his journey, that he too is becoming so familiar with places like Florence, Siena and Chianti, especially Chianti.
In fact if RTE is wondering what to do with the money when it sells the bit of land, there’s a formula here waiting to be copied, simply by replacing the 10 Britons with 10 middle-aged Irish people, five men and five women, and just making the same show.
Yes, we’ve come a long way, from the days when a week in Butlin’s Mosney was seen as quite desirable, days when Tuscany must have seemed an impossibly bohemian place, to which an English rock star of the 1970s might retire to sit outside a cafe wearing a white suit and poring over the Herald Tribune ,to devote himself to his vineyard, or at least to drinking a lot of wine.
Now his dreams can be our dreams too, and as we rejoice in these pictures of La Banditaccia, the 18th century farmhouse set amid the olive groves of southern Tuscany, near the ancient town of Castel del Piano, we find that the only problem with Second Chance Summer: Tuscany — and it is a very slight problem in terms of the overall experience — is that it is completely ridiculous.
Certainly it is now the dream of many, to start anew in a place like Tuscany, or even in Tuscany itself, to do the brave thing, to give it a shot before it is too late, and all that.
But even if you really did get around to doing it, you would hardly do it in the company of nine total strangers, with whom you’d have to negotiate quite complicated things like organising the olive harvest or opening a restaurant.
Indeed I would have thought that organising a round of drinks in the local bar would be complicated enough, without the olive harvest or the restaurant. But then this is a TV programme, and the series mightn’t work quite as well if you just had a guy in a white suit sitting in the sun reading the paper and drinking for six hours.
I would watch it, but that mightn’t be enough for the BBC.
Still we are happy to go along with whatever fictions we find here, so that we can partake of the Tuscany vibe in our own way, imbibing the wisdom of the locals who appear on screen from time to time to utter some profound piece of advice.
“I think that there is one secret to a happy life, and that is to do what you love,” says Pietro, a neighbour of the 10-person crew in La Banditaccia.
Indeed it is a measure of the magic of Tuscany, that men like Pietro look so comfortable in their own skins, even though they are required at all times to be prepared to make some deeply philosophical observation for the benefit of foreigners, on the nature of existence.
If Pietro has any views on the nature of reality TV, they remain unspoken.