Michele Hewitson: It’s all Greek to me

Pauline Collins, in Shirley Valentine, was the first to try it out.

It must be getting awfully crowded in those little, off-the-beaten-track towns in France and Greece. You wonder whether, with the influx of Brits and their attendant camera crews, the locals have moved to Surbiton or Preston, taking a camera crew with them.

But A Place in Preston just doesn't have quite the same ring as A Place in France or, the now-showing version of the British dream, A Place in Greece. That would be quite fun, though, wouldn't it? A couple, say the local post office worker and his mate, decide they would like to create a holiday home from some slum in a picturesque little British suburb. Think of the language problems. The problems with food. What is French for mushy peas? You wonder whether French telly is littered with such innovative programming. You'd think not. And you can see why the idea of packing up and leaving places where the telly is littered with such innovative programming is such an attractive idea.

I have a little fantasy that A Place in France - with the Sikh postal worker Nippy and the anal Nigel - has screened in France, with subtitles. Now that would make an already bonkers series even madder.

While lamenting the loss of Nigel and Nippy - I really want to know what happened next, which is a strange thing to be feeling about some idiotic reality show - we have A Place in Greece in its spot as compensation. APIG does not have the dotty charm of APIF, but its characters share a childlike delusion that's common in adults - visit a foreign place, fall in love with its foreign culture, decide to pack up your life and go and live there forever.

Nigel decided to live in France. In APIG, Andrew and Brian decide they want to go and live in what was supposed to be a shared holiday home. Their partners in delusion, Pat and Lesley, are not chuffed.

Well, you wouldn't be, would you? But this foursome are an unlikely lot - God knows what they have in common beyond fags and booze. And Pat and Lesley should have known they were in the thing with a mad person when Brian decided to push on with his dream of a hydraulic window costing 38,000. You wonder how much of this is rigged for tension. Everything that can go wrong will go wrong. And it serves this lot, and all of the rest of their rotten lot, right.

How would they like it if hundreds of Greek people turned up in their neighbourhood and started building ghastly villas and demanding moussaka?

You were just counting the minutes on APIG, waiting for somebody to mention Shirley Valentine. You were destined not to be disappointed.

Without the tales of tradesmen who appear to be the same the world over - but they are oh-so-much-more-interesting, somehow, when they are tradesmen who speak another language - and strife, there wouldn't be a show. And despite the unlikely success of Nigel and Nippy, you wish there wasn't ever another show - except the one about the French people moving to Preston, or the Greeks moving to Surbiton. Now that could be funny. There's no end to this sort of stuff.

On Sky is something called, confusingly, A Home in France, which is DIY in another country. Why can't these people just stay home?

It'll all end in tears (of boredom) and you suspect that's where they'll all end up, eventually, anyway. Because, as Andrew and Brian found out, it rains in those foreign countries. How dashed rude.