Do you reckon its possible to get fluent without living in the country?

Technically perfect yes. Idiomatic no. You will always sound like someone reciting from a grammar book.
Your language will lack colour and you will come across as a serious/boring fart.

Lots of people who live in urban areas are fluent in French, so I would say it is possible to be fluent in French without living in the country.

Thanks Mr H, thats kinda of what I thought. My French is intermediate at best but my view is that you can learn to speak it from afar but not to hear and understand it.

It all depends on your definition of fluent. Imagine a Frenchman coming to England for the first time and being confronted with working class people from a Northern town rather than the BBC newsreaders he has learnt his English from.
He might be capable or writing a Prix-Goncourt winning novel but he won't come across as fluent and there will be a lot of things he doesn't understand.

I had to read that three times before it stopped flying right over my head!!

every area of every country has its own dialect - there are many English speaking people who don't understand folks who are speaking in English to them!!! Geordies/Scots/Cornish people are good examples!!
An American we spoke to when we were on holiday, thought we were German!!!!!

Any one know how good these "immersion " courses are in France?
1 month x 20 lessons per week cost about £500

Will they take an O level of 35 years ago to some sort of fluency?

Saw a TV prog a few years ago with Esther Rantzen and Marcus the unfunny comedian, they seemed to do OK.

I wan't talking about accents or dialects, Parmo.
When you get a group of people talking socially together (banter) they simply don't use the same language as they do in formal conversation. In, formal speech people say "underprivileged", in informal speech they say "raggy-arsed".

Mr I, what would your instinctive interpretation be of "sapé comme l'as de pique"?

No experience of them, sorry. I had total immersion but without the lessons!
But that schedule sounds like it would give a very good grounding.

Instinctively... I got the ace of spades bit but had to look up sape. Still no wiser.

Is it a black thing?

Wasn't he Australian though?

Easy.........it translates roughly to "undermined as have it of prick"................according to what we use at work for rough translations!!

So probably means something like "do you take it up the arse?"

"Sapé comme l'as de pique" translates to "Dressed up like the Ace of Spades".
But are you any the wiser for knowing that?