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Our picture of France, according to Professor of French and Paris resident Andrew Hussey, is all too often clouded by romantic and outdated cliches that fail to do justice to the true nature of the country. So just as the French might imagine Brits living in a comfortable 1950s idyll of afternoon tea and rolled up umbrellas, so we fall back on visions of berets, baguettes and pastis. In this two part series, he travels the length of the country, from Marseilles in the south to Lille in the north, stopping off in Lyon and Paris along the way. He explores the rich multi-cultural life that has developed over the last fifty years with its tensions as well as its rewards, and walks the streets and visits the bars where the ordinary French people live out their daily lives. As he moves around, he discovers that many of the more recent myths about France - that it is a cultural museum, for example, where nothing new of any note is taking place - are just as false as the old, with the the country's many regions coming alive with a sense of their own identity and a dynamic, creative energy that a previous all-encompassing focus on Paris had prevented. If there is, as de Gaulle suggested, a certain idea of France, Hussey's goal is to discover how that idea has developed and what it looks like right now, in La France Maintenant.