Cheeky?

I know I've probably mentioned this before, but the news reports on Greek TV are rubbish. It doesn't really matter which channel you watch, all the terrestrial channels have hour-long bulletins. You could start watching the "News" at around 3.00pm and still be watching it at 11.00pm the same evening simply by flicking channels.

That's not what amazes me though. What I find myself remarking to my better half most times when we tune in, whether it be to Alpha, Ant1, Open Beyond, Skai, Star or the three ERT channels, is that the actual content of the news during the high summer is verging on the pornographic.

In the UK, despite morals being at an all-time low, all female TV presenters most obviously are told to 'dress-down' (There's no way most of them would even consider wearing some of the weird dresses, jackets and tops that they sit behind the desk or stand beside the Video screen wearing when on camera). Each TV station simply must have a 'wardrobe' dept. where the news readers and presenters probably have to go to change out of what they came to work wearing, into the awful, frumpy, disgusting-coloured stuff that they appear before the Great British Public wearing, and that's my immovable position on the subject.

Yet, here in Greece, even the newsreaders (the female ones) have no qualms about wearing figure-hugging garments that often display ample evidence of their cleavage, as they tell the nation about the events of the day. That's the thing, though, they actually don't tell us all that much about the events of the day. What they do is focus on the latest 'major' event here in Greece; like, for example, "There's a ferry strike planned for next Thursday", or "Forest fires rage in some-such place". If there's been a murder, or someone's disappeared while hiking on an island somewhere, or (more often) some corrupt politician's up before the beak - OK so that will be the main headline, which they'll talk about for fifteen minutes (at least), various pundits yelling at each other while they show a loop of fifteen seconds of video over, and over, and over, and over again.

Once they've exhausted the main story, and I use the word 'exhausted' advisedly, they'll move on to the fact that - wait for it - it's summer (NO!!!) and the weather here in Greece is rather hot (it IS?). Cue lots of video footage taken on beaches around the country, with the camera well and truly concentrating on thong-adorned bums and hankie-sized bikini tops. If you didn't know that it was a news bulletin, and you just switched the TV on, you'd dive for your toddlers to cover their eyes, or fumble with the remote in a desperate attempt to change the channel, only to arrive at another, whose news bulletin overlaps the one you stumbled across, and find that they also have only just discovered that there is a lot of flesh on display on the beaches all over the country. Well, knock me over with a wet fish.

The reporter, trying hard to make it sound of vital importance to the nation, will then be shoving his or her microphone up the noses of girls who look like they're taking a break from shooting the next front page of "Vogue" or "Cosmopolitan", while they lie prone on their sun loungers, and they'll ask things like, "So, how do you cope with the summer heat, then?"

Their answers will usually be highly intellectual replies like, "We come here to the beach. It's a good place for some cooler air, it's a great hang-out. We can go for a swim, it's nice." Queue more video of thongs in bum-cracks as some unwitting girls wade into the sea to cool off.

I'm not kidding folks, really. Now and again one or two of the channels, notably Ant1, will squeeze a kind of 'round-up' of world news in towards the end of the bulletin, usually a bunch of clips cadged from other TV channels from other countries showing a series of almost newsworthy events from places as diverse as Italy, Australia, the UK, the USA etc. This 'round-up' will last all of five minutes. Wow.

Looking around the world there's a lot of pretty vital stuff going on. Putin and Trump seem hell-bent on re-starting the arms race, China's about to get heavy in Hong Kong, climate change is bringing hellish conditions to de-stabilise the weather in country after country, North Korea's firing missiles like there's no tomorrow (there may well not be), mass shootings are almost a daily occurrence in the good old USA, but here in Greece? Well, it's summer, so wonder of wonders, there are lots of babes on the beach that can be surreptitiously filmed to titivate the male viewing public and bemuse the old ya yas of the country, whilst handily filling up the allotted sixty minutes of yet another overly-long news bulletin.

I'm really not kidding, if I had a Euro for every naked bum cheek that I've been subjected to on a Greek beach during a so-called TV 'news' bulletin during a typical Greek summer, then I'd truly be very wealthy indeed. It all kind of reminds me of the old Chris Rea song "Tennis." That song was much misunderstood, but, having heard Rea himself explain it, I can say with confidence that it's making the same kind of point that I'm trying to stress here. As Rea sang in the second verse:

"There are people in boats in the middle of the sea
Crying and dying like Jews
Do you like tennis?
Freedom is the man with the red grenade
She ran out of gas, got beat and raped
Do you like tennis?"

He says "Do you like tennis" to stress the point that (and, oddly enough I actually remember this incident) a rather attractive female tennis player, during her debut appearance at Wimbledon way back when, suddenly found that she had an itch in a region of her body that one would normally not want to draw attention to in public. Without thinking, she shoved her hand down her knickers and had a good scratch. That was all there was to it. Afterwards, she served and started the next rally. The result though, was that even though there was some pretty bad stuff going down in the world at the time, including Vietnamese 'boat-people' dying while trying to escape to another land by sea (plus ça change, eh?), the newspapers the following morning all chose to lead with stills of the unfortunate girl player with her hand down her pants on a show court at Wimbledon. Stuff the really tragic news, as he sang in the first verse...

"But the headline's on tennis

So it seems, everything's all right

There's a girl from the Midwest, with a pretty face

Scratched where it itched, they said it was a disgrace

"I don't wanna go to work today

Wanna stay at home and watch that girl play"

Do you like tennis?

Yes I do."

See, I get it to a degree. The Greek terrestrial TV channels are largely run on very low budgets. In fact one or two have recently gone to the wall, notably the channel "Mega." So they can't finance trips to all the various far-flung corners of the world for their reporters to send VT back from various world hotspots. They simply don't have the budget. So, my argument would be, why not shorten the flippin' news bulletins, instead of titivating the public with all this banal stuff about "people flocking to the beaches and islands because it's summer." I mean - hello!?

What do they fill the news bulletins with in winter I hear you asking? I'll tell you, almost every night there will be some earnest reporter or other talking 'live' from a fish market, or a fruit and veg market in downtown Athens, and they'll be making the price of onions sound like a global issue that's liable to bring down governments.

Of course, they don't actually have to fill the entire sixty minutes with 'news.' When it gets to around a quarter-to the hour they'll break for a full seven or eight minutes of ads, sometimes more, including quite often the same ads repeating three times during the same commercial break. Once you've put the kettle on, had a shower, done some gardening and solved third world debt, you can flop back down on to the sofa again to watch as the commercial break finally comes to an end, just in time for the presenter, who's evidently been waiting at his or her desk for all that time (probably reading War and Peace), to say "Goodnight, and thanks for watching."

Now, where's the sense in that, eh? Why don't they simply let the presenter sign off and then show the ads, when the programme's over? That would be far too logical. Instead the hapless anchor person has to sit there for what must seem like half a lifetime, simply to be able to say goodnight when the ads come to an end. In fact, I reckon a little advice from yours truly would improve the effectiveness of the ad breaks here in Greece anyway. I'm sure you know where I'm coming from on this. I mean, doesn't it stand to reason that if a commercial break is only two minutes long, then more viewers will sit through it (and thus see the ads), knowing that if they get up and go off then they're going to miss something (frequently quite a lot of human flesh in the case of the news) and thus they'll stay put. On the other hand, if a commercial break is known by the viewer to go on for upwards of eight to ten minutes, you can bet your sweet bottom dollar that no one's going to be watching, thus rendering all that advertising expenditure on the part of the advertisers a poor investment.

I've often watched a football match in a local café/bar here in Greece. Once half-time is reached, you won't see a couple of pundits talking about how the match has been so far for fifteen minutes, oh no. What you'll get is a full quarter of an hour of commercials, and so the barman will grab the remote and change channels. Everyone would rather see fifteen minutes of a truly awful soap, or maybe water polo, while they're waiting for the second half of the match to begin, than sit through ad after ad.

Maybe if they reduced sections of the news bulletins to fifteen minutes; you know, those extended reports from flesh-packed Greek beaches, and inserted them into the half-time break, at least people wouldn't want to switch channels.

I reckon some of these thong-clad beach-girls are missing a trick. If they got various logos tattooed onto their cheeks (the ones below the back and above the legs, not the ones each side of the nose, you understand), they could get paid handsomely for strutting down to the water's edge and taking a dip, all the while telling the viewing public (without words) which air-conditioning units to buy.

I should be in advertising.