BRITS BEHAVING BADLY – THAILAND TO GET NEW DOSE FOR BRITISH TELEVISION
Brace yourselves for another massive dose of Brits behaving badly in Thailand. The new genre of British television which spends half the summer in Europe following Brits around the Costas and Greece – now chases them during the winter months in Thailand.
To catch a Brit having sex on the beach, throwing up in a restaurant, and generally behaving like a total moron seems easy an easy occupation – and British Channel 4 television, that last bastion of truth on U.K. television has chosen Chawaeng Beach on Koh Samui and Haadrin Beach as there next target.
They have commissioned Dragonfly Film and Television Productions to produce the documentary series which will once again bring home to the public the full horrors of what goes on in these two resorts…when you allow a British twenty something feed off buckets of ‘Samsom and coke’ – or whatever. Getting rat-faced nightly appears to a Brit holiday norm – so anything can happen.
Of course I am describing Channel 4 as the last bastion of truth in the UK in a somewhat ‘tongue in cheek manner’. Channel 4 has long since seemed to have forgotten all the principals on which it was founded and joined the ratings war. It shovels more cash into this sort of programming than its investigative flagship programme – Dispatches.
In fact television in general in the UK now has followed the US trend and is doing all the stuff the tabloid press has been doing for the last 30 years – and for which they are being blamed for intrusion of privacy.
The problem is that all those featuring in these programmes have to sign ‘release agreements’ allowing themselves to be filmed. Most sign when they are sober. Some, it has been complained, sign when they are drunk. Signing over your rights when sober on what you are going to do when you’re drunk seems a little careless.
Some say you need to have a screw loose or an inflated ego to sign these forms – but there is no shortage of people with both.
Now they are letting all loose on destinations which can be deceptively dangerous if they do not have their wits about them.
If I thought these Brits were representatives of the country as a whole – I’d chuck it in.
Dragonfly personnel are a bit up themselves on this latest production. They say they are not going down the path of the BBC which was exposed in the British press for wasting tax payers money as some 20 odd crew members enjoyed the delights of Phuket due to a glitch in the filming schedule on another Brits Broad film.
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| Caption- Daily Mail |
The BBC took fly on the wall journalism (or rather voyeurism) to new heights with its series ‘Sun, Sex and Suspicious Parents’.
This time they brought along the kids parents – without telling the kids – who were watching their antics on s on monitors and viewing the rushes. I have to say at moments it was not only entertaining but moving.
But one scene shows a mum going through her son’s holiday hotel bedroom which is of course like a tip with used condoms all over the shop and the contents of the toilet paper basked strewn over the floor.
What person would even leave this sort of mess for the chambermaid to see? I don’t want to see it on TV.
But Dragonfly Film and Television got worse press than the BBC when their whole crew had to be recalled from Kavos in Greece after the SUN newspaper revealed what they were looking for.
Below is the Daily Mail headline
The Daily Telegraph reported:
“The series promised viewers “material peppered with intimate and revelatory interviews with the holiday makers, young workers and the locals”.
“However, these production notes suggest that this material is gained with intention to shock. Crews are asked to find ‘groups who are successful with pulling and who have sex’ and encouraged to continue filming at the end of the night in amourous holidaymakers’ apartments.
“If staff found women using the morning after pill, they would get “a special prize for this story”.
These productions are eminently watchable for all the wrong reasons. Personally I have met many young Brits here on holiday who are, clever, polite, educated, and considerate and probably a lot of the targets in the programme back home are all these things too.
But what we get here in these productions is the classic reason why tourism breeds contempt; foreigners of contempt of Thais and Thais growing contempt of foreigners.
Programme makers are striving to outshoot each other into who can produce the nearest to the knuckle presentation.
One young woman on camera in ‘What Happens in Kavos’ says Britain’s youth go bersek because they get some much cr*p back home.
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| What happens in Kavos – the sequel What Happens is coming to Koh Samui and Koh Phangan |
But now the next generation dads will be bouncing their sons on their knees as these shows are repeated saying: ‘Look Wayne. There’s mum just about to be shagged by those lads from Walthamstow. And there’s me getting blown by that Sharon from Billericay.”
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| A ‘Flying Sporran’ – Grump |
So what happened to television’s resistance to the tabloid press, its moral authority, and its ability to talk on a higher plain?
Or am I beginning to sound like am I agreeing with the Daily Mail. I suppose there are not many people who have not got drunk and, er, had a shag, possible many times. But I do not think I would do it on TV, even simulated.
On the first point Dragonfly Productions is owned by the Shine Group. And who are the Shine Group. The Shine Group was acquired in 2011 by Murdoch’s News Corp. Shine TV UK is 80 per cent owned by Elisabeth Murdoch.
I think I have been there.
On the second point the jury is out.
Next month I’m off to Samui to see what I’m missing.
