UNPACKING ITALIAN DOCUMENTARIES
Italy is perhaps best known for its delicious food, stunning art, and a thousand TV documentaries about its delicious food and stunning art. Most of these documentaries lack even a fragment of the imagination displayed by Michelangelo and Donatello centuries previously; they are endless carbon-copy clones which perform the gymnastic feat of following on their predecessors’ heels whilst simultaneously stepping on their toes. Italy documentaries are to
Finding new stories in a well-trodden land
Sicily Unpacked/ Italy Unpacked
This show dispenses with the usual formula of an easily-recognisable (and more importantly, easily marketable) host being walked around and amazed by people more knowledgeable than himself, in favour of two experts. The on-screen chemistry between renowned art historian Andrew Graham-Dixon and multiple-Michelin-starred chef Giorgio Locatelli is one of the things that makes this program such a joy. One of the others is their insistence on avoiding the clichés; an entire episode based around Veneto completely avoids Venice in favour of Chioggia and Padua, and an hour dedicated to Lazio doesn’t once cross the tangenziale of Rome.
TV executives what Princess Diana stories are to The Express, an ever-present lazy option when nothing better presents itself. Insert a few gratuitous shots of the Venetian skyline or rolling Tuscan hills here, add a few brief words from a local shop or market stall owner proudly displaying their selection of meats or cheeses there, conclude with a few glasses of wine in front of a pastel-coloured sunset, and that’s a wrap.
In among all the chaff however, there is also plenty of wheat; programs which find a new angle on the country and how to present it. Here are two such programs, both BBC productions, from recent years: