Well worth a watch....4 episodes in total,

Alex Polizzi's homage to secret Italy - Telegraph

Alex Polizzi's Secret Italy | Channel 5

PSG

I saw the first episode and found it very disappointing - nothing really secret and the continuous use of 'Mamma mia' as her only expression of delight/wonder/astonishment etc was unbelievably grating - she needs to extend her vocabulary! Personally I think the series on Venice and then the whole of Italy with Francesco da Mosta made by the BBC some years ago is far superior.

Oh my golly gosh not ****** Francesco. That guy plays up the Italian thing so much that I half suspect he's from Brum. In one infamous scene he waffles on about Italians being so friendly and outgoing and walks down a street warmly greeting, in a super exaggerated way, a load of strangers. I showed the clip to an Italian and he agreed that it was ludicrous. Francesco is clearly a bright guy but he should be thrown into the back of an ambulance znd whizzed into an operating theatre to have his theatrical italianess removed. Then tossed out the back of the hospital as an Hungarian.

harrumph - an Italy less travelled? VEnice,Naples, Matera - she could have got a bit more off the beaten track...

Woah, sunnysider - what side of the bed did you get out of this morning?! You certainly don't like Francesco but what do you have against Hungarians. Modicasa does have a point about nothing new in the programme. Certainly think hard about coming to live here.

I watched last night's episode today and quite enjoyed it, Venice and Milan. Yeah, not a lot I didn't already know about Venice apart from the woman's prison gardens etc. and I liked seeing the costume department of La Scala. I was also quite impressed with Alex Polizzi's Italian. She used quite a lot in this episode.

can someone tell me how I can watch british tv whilst here in Italy, trying to connect via the above link, I am told that I cannot watch from my current country or location..?

That's because it's an Iplayer and knows your Ip address is not British. You can either download a free programme like Expat Shield to get around this. You just turn on Expat Shield when you want to access an Iplayer, watch what you like and then turn it off again from a simple desktop icon (it temporarily assigns you a fake UK IP address) .... or use the website Filmon. They only keep programmes from the last 24 hours though and not all last week or anything like 'catch-up'. You can use it as a recorder though and watch whatever you have recorded when you feel like it.

You can't access iPlayer using Expat Shield anymore.

I didn't know that but it can't be all of the Iplayers as it's still working on 4OD.
Is it just the BBC that got blocked?

Yes, sorry. It's the BBC that you can't get with Expat Shield. Its still available on other VPNs.

No eastenders then guv' 'innit!

You can using unblock-us.com but it does cost $5 a month.

I use myexpatnetwork which costs £5/month and works very well for all UK channels.

And I should have said that its no longer available with the free version of Expat Shield. No idea if its available with the pay version. Maybe I should have just kept stumpf in the first place.