One Thousand Shades of Grey

I recently made the effort to revisit the 1978 film Midnight Express. The film depicts the apparently true story of Billy Hayes incarceration in a Turkish prison for attempting to smuggle hashish out of the country in 1970, his experiences in prison and his subsequent escape. The film is reviled by the Turks and as I sat there watching it with my Turkish wife I could understand why, the film wheels out grotesque caricature after grotesque caricature of hideously distorted Turkish stereotypes and insulting attacks on Turkish identity. One of the reasons the film is so hated by Turks is that they feel that the movie has done lasting damage to their image abroad, with its extremely negative portrayals of Turkish personalities and not one single portrayal of even a positive character trait let alone a good Turk. Truth & Fiction In Turkey the film is often written off as being a film designed to make the Turks look bad and based on lies. This is largely due to the sensationalist depi...

A contender for the most appalling badly scripted pile of cak on British TV, we are only on the third episode and already we have discovered and then burnt the true cross (i.e. the one Jesus was crucified on) saved A black American senator’s reputation apparently ushering him one step closer to becoming the next president of the United States and found the secret love chamber of Boudica including her perfectly crystallized body. I never realised archeology was so exciting, in three episodes these guys have racked up more death threats then Salman Rushdie, George Bush and Kathy Sierra put together, excavated in a tidal estuary and a collapsing cave full of sulphurus gases. The dialogue is so poor that I can only assume that the writers are either deliberately taking the piss or freshly flown in from the Hollywood school of (crap) writing. I was particularly impressed by the scene in tonight’s episode when they had to negotiate a mine field made of buried Roman hand grenades! I can on...

If you saw personal services required on channel 4 last night then you caught a small glimpse of the life of an au pair in the UK. Ridiculously long hours a job that doesn’t match the description, employers that want to pay you below minimum wage to work seventy+ hours a week, lack of decent food, no privacy and limited access to the bathroom. My wife did some time as an au pair as an opportunity to improve her English, the idea being (like most au pairs that come here) that she would work 30-40 hours a week cleaning and babysitting etc, then spend her free time studying and communicating with native English speakers. The guidelines are as follows: Works 5 hours per day, 5 days per week Baby sits 2-3 evenings per week Receives 2 free days and evenings off Weekly salary ranges from 52 - 65 She worked for a few different families and the reality was that she worked six days a week, she was always up when the young poorly disciplined children were up even on her day off, she rarely had ti...