The problem with you is it's all Mimi...

Operagnostic your correspondent may be, and certainly allergic to Puccini, but duty calls and so a break in sunny Provence is briefly interrupted by an evening in front of la télé.

As you probably know, the vast majority of French telly is a complete disaster, a consumer of the souls of men. The one exception is Arte, the Franco-German cultural channel with the unashamed mission of intelligent cultural broadcasting. And on Tuesday 29 September, all the talk was of its multi-platform transmission of 'La Bohème en Banlieue' ('La Bohème in the Suburbs'), a live performance of the opera staged in and around a block of flats in Bern, Switzerland.

Featuring actual residents as extras, real-life locations (including a real-life artist's studio which was used for the appropriate scenes) and an audience of local people able to move around and follow the action from mere metres away, the production demonstrated a truly committed attempt at live action opera.

The only real quibble was in the handling of the necessarily long scene changes (you were occasionally aware of a protagonist or two legging it to the next location) in which singers, fresh from their arias, would be collared by a presenter and given dull Match of the Day style questions to answer. And was there a touch of self-satisfaction in the explanations of how the technical challenges involved in the production were overcome?

But the singers (Maya Boog and Saimir Pirgu as Mimi and Rodolfo, Eve Liebau and Robin Adams as Musetta and Marcello, Gerardo Garciacano as Schaunard) all took to their unfamiliar circumstances with dedication, even deploying that rarely used operatic weapon - acting. And who could fail to be moved, if not amused, that she dies on a bendy bus heading for... the 'Endstation'?

You should find it here, until 6 October.