You can tell summer has arrived here in France because the signs are all around us.
First up there are the obvious ones – such as the weather and the dress code. Of course the latter, especially in the nation’s capital, can still turn into something of a catwalk as this year’s chic hits the streets big time in what for many is the Mecca of the fashion world.
Then there are the music festivals, concerts, outdoor productions, and jumble sales held up and down the country and let’s not forget the smell of a BBQ wafting in from the neighbour’s garden.
Prime time television news reports begin focussing on the queues at airports and the number of passengers passing through the French capital’s major railway stations, rather than hard news. And national newspapers go in for the inevitable silly season.
The inside lanes of the motorways are bumper-to-bumper full of Dutch cars, trailers and caravans, busting at the seams with provisions for a month.
In August of course, when (hopefully) summer will be in full swing a huge chunk of the country will all but close down for a month and Paris will put up shop almost completely as the French head south literally and metaphorically with “Aoutien†holidaymakers replacing “Juilletistesâ€.
But the real clue that the whole shebang is underway has to be the reappearance on the small screen of Secret Story.
It reared its less than attractive head on Friday evening on the country’s number one national channel, TF1, and is set to be in everyone’s sitting rooms for the next 10 weeks.
In essence it’s France’s answer to Big Brother – only more downmarket. Impossible you might think, but sadly true.
Basically the idea is very simple. It starts with 15 people, strangers to each other – with the odd exception, as will become clearer later on – moving into a built-for-TV house, where they’ll be under the watchful eye of the production team and the viewing public 24/7 (via the Internet of course) for two and a half months.
Each carries with them into the house a “secret” – and the idea is to keep it hidden from the others for as long as possible while trying to cajole out of fellow house mates exactly what they’re trying to keep under wraps.
Off camera there is also the deep bass booming tones of The Voice (La Voix), dropping hints whenever he feels like it, setting playful if somewhat idiotic tasks with cash rewards should they be completed successfully without anyone else in the house realising.
Every week two candidates are nominated and television viewers get to vote in a ‘phone poll (at premium rates of course) on who should stay in. Original stuff huh?
Yes the country which so often likes to think that it has taken the cultural highroad, brought the world classics in the fields of literature, art and music, prides itself on its language and traditions, cuisine, fine wines and haute couture – now proves once again that it can mix it with the best and worst of what the world of reality TV has to offer.
The new series, which kicked off on Friday evening will have a hard act to follow.
Last summer, when TF1 first ran the programme, the eventual winner quickly had her secret revealed .She was a triplet – and after the other house members wheedled it out of her, in tramped her two sisters.