Shakespeare in Italy, BBC Two, review It has been the question on everyone's lips: just how far can his charm take him? Beneath that thatch of fair hair, is he a bumbling buffoon or a classically educated wit with a twinkle in his eye? Sadly for Francesco da Mosto, BBC Two documentaries demand a lot more than charm. The premise of Shakespeare in Italy, a new two-part programme written and presented by the Venetian, is that Shakespeare set some of his plays in Italy. Digging a little deeper at the start of last night's episode, da Mosto learnt that there are seven years in the Bard's life which are unaccounted for. Shakespeare, he therefore seemed to decide, must have spent some time in Italy. Fantastico! At this point, approximately three minutes into the hour, da Mosto shipped his academic anchor, winked at the camera (or he may as well have done) and went on a jaunty sail through a raging ocean of Italian cliché. What had looked as though it might be an incisive literary travelogue instead ended up feeling more like a guided tour of the thoughts of a man lying in bed after a bottle of particularly thick Chianti. He took passages of Italy-related verse as his starting points for a series of surreal vignettes. To investigate "Romayo ay Jooliaytta," for instance, he steered his Alfa Romeo to Verona to eat penne while two actors performed scenes from the play next to him. Adding to the dreamlike quality, one of the actors was Samuel Barnett, who played the brilliant, decidedly gay schoolboy Crowther in The History Boys. How did he get mixed up in this? To discuss Othello he cruised around Venice in a water taxi, before an opera singer gave a personal performance of Verdi's Otello in a square. A small gaggle of tourists looked on, as baffled as the rest of us. And to illuminate Much Ado About Nothing da Mosto rolled off to Sicily to meet up with Emma Thompson who, wearing a blue cagoule but as brayingly thespy as ever, clutched his arm and giggled while they looked at masks and bits of lace. If you find Mr da Mosto irresistible, as actresses of a certain age and BBC commissioning editors clearly do, then you wouldn't have minded that there is not a single piece of firm evidence that Shakespeare visited Italy at all. Or that the few moments of real interest - a visit to Petrarch's house, for instance, and the "Giulietta" letter-writing service in Verona - were almost completely unconnected to the playwright. Another self-interested European, Albert Camus, wrote that charm is a way of getting the answer "yes" without having asked a clear question. Da Mosto kept finding affirmative answers, but I was never sure what he was asking.