• DVD: Summer's Lease (Acorn Media)

I am a hopeless Masterpiece Theatre addict -- the giant tea mugs and tendency to use the odd Britishism are dead giveaways -- and since my high school days those Sunday night literary adaptations and gritty dramas have been a cause for celebration, if not popcorn. Perhaps you too are part of the Masterpiece Theatre Underground. Raise your hand if you couldn't identify the latest medical drama or incarnation of CSI, even under interrogation, but have spent many an evening in the agreeable company of Peggy Ashcroft, Helen Mirren, Gordon Jackson, Ian Richardson, Timothy Spall, et al. Great performances, great memories.

For me it was therefore a happy surprise when Acorn Media issued a DVD set of Summer's Lease, a quirky 1989 miniseries about an English family's stay at a villa in Tuscany. John Mortimer himself wrote the screenplay, adapting his novel of the same name. Susan Fleetwood stars as Molly Pargeter, a British housewife whose summer vacation takes both exhilarating and unsettling turns.

If you haven't seen the array of movies -- Room with a View, Enchanted April, Where Angels Fear to Tread, etc. -- in which stuffy Brits go to Italy to get their groove back, why are you sitting there reading this blog? There are DVDs and VHS tapes for you to track down. Go find them.

While the rest of you are getting caught up in that that department, I'll get back to Molly's story. As played by Fleetwood, Molly is that essential but often self-effacing figure that every family needs: the one who rallies the troops, puts up with the moods and inconveniences and hysterical children, forgives a lot and appears to ask little in return. It follows too that such a person has hidden but rarely disclosed talents and passions, and in Molly's case those come to the fore when she takes that crucial summer holiday with her family.

It is not destined to be a smooth ride. The older two of her three daughters are affectionate enough but also in the midst of that "My parents are so uncool" stage. Her husband, who may or may not be keeping some dirty little secrets from her, has been blackmailed into inviting along her crafty old reprobate of a father (John Gielgud), a leftist writer and wit with a deathless libido and a gift for embarrassing everybody.

On top of that, the water goes out at their vacation home. And did I mention someone turns up dead?

But I've barely scratched the surface of Molly's meandering, enigmatic tale, which manages to encompass her passion for Italian paintings and her growing quest to uncover the secrets of the community. This unassuming British tourist has a few surprises in store.

As Molly, the luminous Fleetwood is both grounded and vulnerable, a woman whose basic intelligence and good intentions can't always save her from trouble.

Not surprisingly, Mortimer has given Gielgud all the best lines, which I will leave for you to enjoy during the film. And there's a rich supporting cast making up the array of aristocrats, bored youth, tourists, wheeler-dealers, and others in the Pargeters' suddenly expanded social circle.

There's even sort of a reverse Enchanted April thing going on, in that we follow Molly back to rainy old London as the series concludes.

My one concern with the DVD is that the digital transfer could stand to be brighter and crisper. Nevertheless, as you are drawn into the film, there are plenty of visual pleasures, notably that Tuscan scenery and some wonderful Piero della Francesca paintings Molly can't resist seeking out.

As it happens, the DVD set recreates the experience of watching the miniseries: chapters open with a recap of the previous episode, followed by the theme music, and end with credits and a reprise of the music. It makes a nice change from those irritating snipe ads that nearly all the networks now cram into the screen to distract you from the program you're watching -- sorry, to promote hot new shows. Anyway, with this DVD, it's all Summer's Lease, all the time.

And I loved hearing Nigel Hess's music again, especially the opening and closing theme, "Carmina Valles," sung by Chameleon, which is made up of members of the Swingle Singers. Hess is noted for his compositions for British and American television series, and it's a safe bet PBS fans have heard his music at one time or another.

As for the old question about whether one should read a novel before seeing the film adaptation, I'd offer the following observation. Olsson's carries both the novel and the DVD of Summer's Lease, and as one of my Scottish friends used to say when offered the choice between chocolate and ice cream, "Can't we have both?"