Television - Andrew Billen is unsettled by sex, juju and exorcism in Tuscany

I once nearly crashed a hire car on the road from Siena to Florence. I would have pled temporary insanity, caused by the sudden appearance around a corner of a flock of beautiful black African women dressed in bras and hot pants - a vision I would have dismissed as a trick of a diseased mind, had the scene not been repeated shortly afterwards, thigh for thigh, in Bernardo Bertolucci's film Stealing Beauty. The second instalment of Tuscany (Channel 4, 13 January, 9pm) finally and fully explained the apparition.

They were, of course, prostitutes, some of the 1,000 young Nigerians reckoned to be working in Italy, servicing the estimated nine million Italian men who pay for sex. The girls supply what, it must be presumed, the men cannot get at home - anal sex - and the going rate is £150, good money. Understandably, when the women are arrested as illegal immigrants, they fight like wild boar. The police, we were told, are bitten and smeared with menstrual blood, and have had to turn a deaf ear to the curses rained down upon them.

So far, so unromantic, but it got worse. In Foreign Bodies, Catherine Bailey, the producer, and her director, Rod Williams, demonstrated that the women were very often literally in thrall to curses issued by their madams, ex-whores who smuggle their charges to Italy for ludicrous sums of money (£30,000, in some cases) and then tax their wages until the debt is paid.

The documentary followed two women, Bridget, slight and poised, and Faith, fuller, and initially, it seemed, more pliable. Bridget was first to be "rescued" by the well-meaning priest Don Orete Benzi, who had decided God's mission was to get them off the streets and into decent jobs. In return for a resident's permit, Bridget denounced her madam, who had been deported back to Nigeria and was now persecuting her mother for the outstanding money. Trussed up in Sunday-school hat and suit, Faith, also tempted by the primrose path to respectability, kept her appointment with Benzi. In the end, however, she decided to honour her deal with her madam. It was a bond freely entered into, and anyway, the voodoo-like curses would catch up with Father Benzi's "saved" in the end.

Benzi seemed a good type. Unfortunately, he was working for a church fully discredited by the previous week's instalment of this antidote to travelogues, which examined the Catholic Church's own voodoo, exorcism. His 76-year-old colleague, Father Alfredo, is one of 15 licensed exorcists in Tuscany and performs ten exorcisms a week in his bunker, deep in a convent in Lucca. The figure is less impressive than it sounds, because it includes appointments such as his regular and inconclusive dates with Martina, a teenager whom Satan had allegedly entered when she was eight. During the sessions, which we watched from the doorway, Martina did an impressive impression of Linda Blair, screaming and kicking, while outside the nuns spooked each other with horror stories about levitating chairs. Even they, however, could not help but notice that Martina, by now robbed of the use of her legs, was getting worse: "Father Alfredo must be careful."

Martina had been sexually abused as a young girl. A reasonable-sounding psychiatrist in a designer shirt explained that these regular exorcism sessions were liable to reinforce irrational and dangerous convictions (that her abuser had also "bewitched" her, for example) and were in turn likely to lead to further pathological behaviour. I don't know what they did to the Devil, but the exorcism - in which her parents applied holy oil to her vagina as Alfredo pranced around encouragingly - certainly scared me.

This series could easily have been called The Real Tuscany. As it was, the single word, Tuscany, worked a sullen irony. The programmes said: "You think Chiantishire is the most civilised place on earth: actually, it's one of the most primitive." If the opening episodes had kept to exorcisms and the slave-trade prostitutes, they might even have convinced us. Both, however, strayed into telling less compelling tales. For instance, the more the first programme tried to horrify us with the hatred and divisions thrown up by Siena's annual Paleo horse race, the more we thought of Leeds and Arsenal. As well as the stories of the prostitutes, the second episode followed the fortunes of a group of Albanian illegal immigrants living in a shanty town of abandoned railway carriages. Again, we could compare, but not particularly contrast, with Sangatte.

The best of the three-part series is actually shown on 19 January. It is the best because it is the least hectoring, wryly following life in the little town of San Giovanni d'Asso (population: 4). Among its citizens is Simonetta Lippi, elder sister of the local countess and a cross between Mrs Danvers and Basil Fawlty. Taking on first a set of dreamy English watercolourists and then the wedding of an opulent Belgian film producer and his pregnant bride, Simonetta seemed put on this earth to make the lives of visitors to Tuscany that bit more difficult. Evidently, she is a TV natural, as rare a delicacy as the white truffle itself. Tuscany is the kind of anti-travel series that makes you want to go speeding back - but I'll be taking those corners more carefully next time.

Andrew Billen is a staff writer on the London Evening Standard

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