TV back to normal

Easter is taken rather more seriously on the whole here in Greece than it is back in the UK, where Christmas tends to be the bigger public festival. Thankfully, now that the holiday season is over, Greek TV has returned to normal.

During the run-up to Easter, programming mostly falls into three camps, with shows and films either for kids, of a religious nature, or actually of religious services.

At times during Passion week both ET1 and NET show the same religious ceremony, and all of the channels were prone to suddenly breaking into Easter religious observance.

The kids stuff was mostly unbearable tosh like Short Circuit 2 and some terrible, terrible adventure movie about a Loch Ness type monster called Orci with one of the cast of Dawson's Creek in it as a young boy.

And the rest seemed to follow the basic pattern of if it has Jesus in it, we'll show it - hence "Jesus Of Nazareth" and "The Passion Of The Christ" being amongst several Jesus movie features being shown.

(I noted that Cretan Nikos Kazantzakis' "The Last Temptation" was conspicuous by its absence. I Wonder why?).

Then, if it didn't actually have Jesus in it, any old Bible based movie or mini-series would do.

And if it didn't have proper Biblical people in it, then bio-pics of other religious types would be OK - hence "Saint Francis of Assisi - The Movie" being on.

Finally, if a station had exhausted their supply of movies featuring Jesus, Moses, Joan of Arc etc etc, then basically anything with Romans in it would pass muster, hence "Ben Hur", "Cleopatra" and "Spartacus" all being shown last week.