Under the Vines, review: no fizz, no excitement and decidedly non-vintage

Telegraph

3 days ago

At what point does nice become insufferable? One way to find out is to binge-watch Under the Vines (BBC One), an odd-couple comedy-drama set in the world capital of normalised niceness, New Zealand.
When an old vintner leaves his South Island vineyard split between his nephew, a stuffy middle-aged Brit (Charles Edwards) and his stepdaughter, a flighty, spendthrift Aussie (Rebeca Gibney), they both descend on Central Otago to check out their inheritance. They quickly decide to sell it – they don't like each other, neither of them knows anything about wine-making and anyway, the vineyard's a bust.
We all know what happens next. Louis (Edwards) and Daisy (Gibney) inevitably end up falling in love with the place, the quirky locals and, in the fullness of six episodes, each other. It is a tale as old as TV time – the town mice and the country mice; Northern Exposure, Green Acres, Death in Paradise and many more, whereby simple living leads to personal discovery with a healthy dose of fish-out-of-water chuckles on the way.
Both Louis and Daisy's lives back home needed fixing – he is an overworked lawyer who was about to split up with his wife and lose his child if he didn't get his act together. She was a Sydney socialite reliant on handouts from the now dead stepfather to sustain her Jimmy Choo habit. Wine and grapes and careful husbandry are used as an overarching metaphor for them both slowing down and paying attention to the things that matter. Once Louis and Daisy start to realise what those things are – family, good people, nature – they begin to revel in their new life.
It presents writer Erin White with a problem about halfway through the first series, because Louis's beloved son Julian is back in London. He is flown down for a convenient holiday and a dubious plot twist later on in the run, but the fact remains that, were Under the Vines anything approaching half-credible, Louis would never have gone to New Zealand in the first place.
It leads you to ask in what reality this show is set, and the answer comes in learning that it is a series that is nearly five years old. It was first aired on Acorn TV, a British-American streamer that specialises in nice British telly, just after the pandemic.
In that context Under the Vines makes a lot more sense: it offers the lure of getting away from it all, the idea of working outside, of actually interacting with strangers at all and seeing hills and mountains and rolling fields. This was all we really wanted from television in 2021.
But while wines may improve with age, Under the Vines has not. A few years ago, there was also a vogue for what was then called 'slow' television in which nothing much happened, and Under the Vines is slow, gently sozzled, sundowner TV served with a few gigglers and some idiosyncratic characters as ballast. Great for the New Zealand tourist board, great for the wine industry, but expect only to be tickled, never engrossed.