KEY POINTS:
The terrible stress that is Ann and David's bonkers dream in A Place in Slovakia II (tonight, 9.35, TV One) is getting to everybody - not least those of us watching at our place.
I can't be the only one who thought the BBC must have paid for
the Slovakian builder to send a fax to the couple as they tried to unwind on a holiday in the sun. The roof, faxed the builder, had come off. Ann, predictably, aah, hit the roof - never a pretty sight, but a sight more pretty than watching her pool side in her newly purchased togs with mesh bits that were revealing, but not too revealing. They were rather too revealing for me.
Now, in the second series, Ann and David are about to open for business. We have heard this before. Last week, as their first guests were about to arrive at a chateau that looked, as it has looked for six months, like a building site, Ann headed off to London to give a sales pitch to a room full of grim-faced people at the grim Slovakian Embassy. "We've turned it into a luxurious and exclusive boutique hotel," she enthused, lying through her teeth and, oddly, a bolt from the blue did not come through the roof and strike her dead.
She had left David in charge, with a very long list, which included the instruction, written in large capital letters: Be Nice To The Guests.
Earlier, she had called David to a guest bathroom to ask if he noticed anything was missing: the builders had tiled up the doorway to what was supposed to be the sauna room. David hadn't noticed anything. "And you're asking me if I'm worried about leaving David on his own?" she said to the film crew.
The walling-up of the sauna room was the least of their worries. With the first guests due to arrive, the chateau looked like, yes, a building site.
Meanwhile, the painters were getting paint all over the carpets, the builders were getting glue all over the carpets. And outside, "we've got one lad working and he's sort of the village idiot", said Dave.
It would be interesting to know what the village idiot and the other villagers think of this couple who have turned up in their midst with, in Ann's case, no Slovakian, and bought a crumbling ruin. Just a guess, but it's possible they think the lad in the chateau grounds does not hold the current title for village idiot.
The guests duly arrived and were duly, and rudely, turned away by David.
Ann: "He doesn't mix well with people. He doesn't particularly like people."
Ann does. Another guess: She's the sort who would describe herself as a "people person" as opposed say, to a goat person.
She decided to get a hotel manager. There were some interviews with locals who couldn't speak English. Then the interview with Thierry, the Frenchman who got the job. Of course he did. "What's your star sign? said Ann. "I'm a Capricorn," said Thierry. "I'm a Capricorn," said Ann.
That was that then. And so on they go, on their idiotic way, taking us, aghast at their awfulness, with them. What will happen next? Oddly enough, torrential rain and lightning bolts ...
