San Stefanos on TV - Thursday 11th Oct - ITV1

[dibully]

Hope you had a good holiday Tony

[Bee]

I have been watching this programme and am thoroughly enjoying it.  The first two episodes have featured SS Travel with Noula and Sally quite a lot.  I have to admit that it was seeing this, that brought back such fond memories of SS I am desperate to get back in 2013.  My last visit was in 2008 and things hadn't changed that much in the years since 1983.

I'm looking forward to the next episode

[tonyco1]

Hope you had a good holiday Tony

Thanks Di - lovely!!
Tony

[Jimbo]

Thought Episode 4 featured:

a) some rather nice looking paintings - though the camera crew decided not to give us a perfect shot - sack the director!
b) half-arsed attempt to capture the full Kavos nightmare (been there, seen it!)
c) a young woman of such cringe-making stupidity and selfishness I nearly felt sorry for her
d) you can't sell olive oil any more! Liked Scarlet, who seems to have fully assimilated

It's not Panorama!

[Lesley]

Episode 5 this evening (Thursday) ITV1 22.35 hrs UK time 

[Bee]

Looking forward to it already, it's so good to see lots of familiar places

[Lesley]

Episode 6 this evening same time same station......

[Bee]

Watching it as we speak

[Lesley]

Its Thursday so its episode 7 this evening will cover as well as other areas our lovely Lucy in Sidari.

[Lesley]

Last of series, episode 8 on ITV 1 this evening at UK time 10.35 pm.......The Tale of Two Islands.....

[Jimbo]

It's been very quiet in the forum as everybody plans the "I'm a Celebrity Get Me Out Of Here" that is Christmas. So to get your mind off How Round Are My Stuffing Balls? here is my review of the Corfu program:

I thought this was a very poor and disappointing documentary series, for the following reasons:

This was a total of over three hours of screen time (allowing for adverts). That should provide scope for analysis. It didn't.

* There was no sense of landscape. If I'd never been there I would have little idea of the geography. Even a simple graphic map zoom to (say) Kavos would have helped. The entire series failed utterly to give us perspective.

* It was very repetitive. Every episode had the same components. Let's find a few ExPats and a woman who married a Greek man, a brain-dead Essex girl who stayed and struggled to do much except get her tits out.

* The almost total absence of a local Greek view of things, unless it was the husband of a woman from Croydon. You're making a documentary about a major Greek island and you fail to talk to any key local politicians? Come on - this is amateur night.

* Appalling voice-over commentary, confusing Agios Stefanos NE with Agios Stefanos NW, renaming the posh bit as 'San Stefanos', total inability to say Mount Pantokrator in any way resembling its actual pronunciation, utter lack of any insight into anything.

I could go on. I thought it was a fourth-rate production. Even the title was wrong in a sense, because there are many "islands" of culture in Corfu - not just rich Brits/Poor Brits.

It isn't really good enough, is it, to say "Oh look, there's the beach!" because we should learn a bit about how the complex engineering of Corfu works.

Mull on that with some mulled wine!

[YANNIS26]

Hi Jimbo
We have been known to disagree over a few things over the years but not this time.This time two minds think as one.I agree totally with all your points.It was so bad that if I did not know the real Corfu it would be the last place on earth I would visit.A place full of hoorah Henrys and and 18-30s.A combination that would be my idea of holiday hell.For a program that kept saying the corfiot economy is having it tough it did it no favours.
I know some members will not agree with this view and they are entitled to do so.
Yammas
Yiannis
 

[Jimbo]

It's Christmas, and we have peace and love! Yammas! We don't disagree that much, anyway.

I think it's important to distinguish between a travelogue, a commercial, and a documentary. If were still a producer I would regard the series as having failed to be a successful example of any of them.

The only positives were seeing Noula, Sally and Cerys. Even if I hadn't been to AS I think I would have fallen in love. It was, perhaps, a bad move to tip the grass cuttings into the stream on camera, but then I've always had a penchant for naughty girls.

The artist in Agios Stephanos NE seemed quite interesting - but the production was so bad that we didn't get a full-screen image. If you're going to shoot an exhibition opening it's number one to show some of the work. Point camera at picture and lock the tripod. Shoot a few seconds. Or take some good stills to use in the edit. Instead, a load of people drinking bubbly was the most we really had. This was a recurrent failure in the series.

It would be wrong to run a lengthy commercial for Corfu, so at least that wasn't fulfilled. I get the feeling that the researcher was told to run around finding examples of rich and poor Brits, with a few token Greeks in the mixture if possible. Documentary, then, not - I would be interested to know where the money for the very posh buses came from, where the EU strategic money for things like the Avliotes bypass went, what the political relationship between Corfu and Athens was. I'd like to know the relationship between the major tour operators and the commanding heights of the local economy was. This does not have to be boring. In fact, it would have enhanced our knowledge, and that's the point of a documentary.

There are some deep and dark questions to be asked about the way Corfu runs. Nepotism is probably high on the list. A real documentary should take a stab at that. It didn't.   

[loftyscot]

We watched the first two episodes and didn't bother with the rest. First one was intriguing given the focus on San Stef.

Friends watched it too given we had been 4 times and were interested to see what SS looked like.

They thought it was 'full of old people' and asked us why on earth would they want to visit there with their young families :-(

That's the dangers of TV informing opinion. At least Robert Peston wasn't doing the voiceover or he would really have 'stuck the boot in' to the island's fortunes.

[tonyco1]

I watched all episodes and there was good and bad in the program.
It certainly didn't promote fairly in except to the wealthy in San Stefanos NE,

Episode 1 was pretty good - (thanks mainly to the girls from San Stefanos Travel),
parts of other episodes also, but Jim has some points in his critique'.....

It didn't portray what most of us enjoy about Corfu and San Stefanos NW in Particular....
But as a person smitten with the Island, I still got some pleasure in viewing, in spite of the poor edit.

I got the opinion it was in the main, all about living as ex-pats' and the mixed economics of Island Life.
They turned it into Eastenders - as a lot of doom and gloom in later episodes - - not my vision of Corfu.

However - the scenery - breathtaking!!