BBC’s middle-class Big Brother… on a Tuscan farm

MILLIONS of Britons have daydreamed about packing up their lives, heading for the sun and starting again.

Often the fantasy features running a guesthouse, or living off the land.

But while most of us stop short of making the change, BBC2 is to follow a group of strangers attempting just that.

Second Chance Summer will track ten people at crossroads in their lives, as they move to a Tuscan farm and try to get to grips with life in their Italian idyll. The motley group of middle-aged Britons will spend seven weeks learning to press olive oil, make wine and welcome guests to a small bed and breakfast on their land.

None of the participants has enough money to buy the farm on their own, but at the end of the experiment they will be asked whether they want to return to Britain, or stay in Tuscany by pooling their cash to buy it.

Television insiders have described it as the middle-class version of Eden, the Channel 4 survival show in which contestants live of the land in the Scottish Highlands. But a BBC spokesman said that Second Chance Summer was far from a reality contest.

The production company behind the show is still choosing the line-up, but it is understood that they will include an empty nester, eager for a new adventure, and a ‘materialis- tic’ businessman, trying to get to change his life. No transmission date has been set. ÷A BBC3 documentary will show pathologists dissecting the corpse of a 17- stone American woman to demonstrate what obesity does to the body.

The 60-minute programme, Obesity: The Post-Mortem, is due to be released on the online channel in the middle of next month. The BBC defended the graphic documentary by saying that audiences ‘absolutely’ need to see the impact of obesity in this way.