EVER feel like jacking in the day job or the mid-week grind of Aqua Fit and starting a new life somewhere else? Then I strongly advise you to first check out Second Chance Summer: Tuscany (BBC2, Wednesday, 9pm).

The idea is simple: 10 middle-aged strangers, including a hipster from Scotland, leave the UK to spend two months on a farm 90 miles from Florence to get a taste of the real Tuscan life. After that, they can opt to buy the farm together (that’s not code for dying en masse like some doomsday cult: the place is actually for sale), or they can go home and pull the duvet over their head and vow never to meet new people again. As one guinea pig says with a smile best described as brave, “What could possibly go wrong?”

Plenty, we hope. This Toby Jones-narrated reality show might be setting out in a spirit of la dolce vita, but it would be no fun for the toiling masses at home if there was no schadenfreude on the horizon. There are indeed shocks in store for our would-be expats, including finding out that harvesting grapes is backbreaking work, and that it is tricky settling in anywhere if you don’t speak the lingo. With its blend of trials and errors, Second Chance might as well have called itself Big Brother/The Apprentice/Britain’s Got No Language Skills.

Surprise, surprise, it is made by the same folk behind The Real Marigold Hotel. Even less surprising, by the first night some of the 10 are already shaping up to be royal pains in the neck. Ain’t that a shame?

A far easier way to experience life abroad is on display in The Trip to Spain (Sky Atlantic, Thursday, 10pm). The conceit is that the show follows a raving egomaniac comedian called Steve Coogan and his fellow performer Rob Brydon, the insecure Ollie to Coogan’s Stan, as they go on a foodie tour. Any resemblance to the real Coogan and Brydon is entirely muddied. Like the brilliant Larry Sanders, The Trip is a mock doc, a show pretending to be a free-wheeling slice of reality when it is really a mix of scripted material and improvisation gorgeously shot by Michael Winterbottom. It blew BBC2’s mind with its ever increasing lavishness (the last series was set in Italy), so had to transfer to Sky Atlantic where it has found a very happy new home.

Featuring mouth-watering grub and ritzy hotels with hot and cold running fluffy bathrobes, The Trip ought to be a recipe for even more envy, if only the Coogan-Brydon double act, complete with impersonation competitions, carpool karaoke and their persistent neediness was not so funny.

I once entered a dog agility contest. Not on my own: I had a Labrador with me. Our combined performance was so horrendously bad I thought we would never be able to show our faces in Mugdock Country Park again. It was with some trepidation, therefore, that I switched on Me and My Dog: The Ultimate Contest (BBC2, Wednesday, 8pm).

Hosted by Chris Packham, it bills itself as “a physical and mental competition for humans and their dogs”, which translates as fun and games in the countryside mixed with science bits. At the end of week one, the stars are proving to be Packham, the human springer-spaniel, and Benny, the rescue dog. There is a yellow Lab in the mix, too. Flapjack is described by his human, Toni, as “very handsome and slightly thick”. He duly came last in the nature slalom, and in the towed cycling event he made a beeline for the packed lunches rather than the open road. I love you, Flapjack.

All right you lot, enough mucking about. This is your final reminder to catch up with Broadchurch (STV, Monday, 9pm) as it moves towards its series finale on Easter Monday. As ever, the list of suspects is as long as an orangutan’s arm and it is anyone’s guess who the culprit will turn out to be. No question, though, that Broadchurch, after its second series wobble, is back at the top of the league of detective dramas with David Tennant and Olivia Colman making the best crime fighting duo since Miss Marple and her comfy shoes.

Monday’s episode managed to be both desperately sad and punch the air uplifting, as when DS Ellie Miller (Colman) tore a strip off her young colleague for not appreciating what the older woman had gone through in her career. Tennant’s DI Alec Hardy, no stranger to dispensing the hairdryer treatment himself, was impressed. “Might put you in charge of bollockings from now on, Miller.”

Fine by us, guv.