The Durrells on Corfu; Corfu and Lesbos; Greece

Migrants, different islands, different times

"Upping sticks for the sun"

First episode last night. Charming. ITV Player - "Louisa Durrell uproots her four children to build a new life in the island of Corfu". The second episode...

Durrell ideals are worth conserving, Dr Lee Durrell

The advance trailer

Durrell Wildlife Conservation Trust

Radio Times

The Times, Joanna Hodgkin, The Durrells: Lawrence, Gerald and the real family behind the fiction -
"The saga has drifted so far from its original as to be almost unrecognisable...The 1935 reality was that Larry and Nancy decided to follow friends to an island paradise of cheapness where he could write and she could paint. When Mrs Durrell discovered this she announced that she was coming too...Does it matter? Not really...The family must appeal to some fundamental need we all have for there to have been a time when Corfu was bathed in perpetual summer sunshine, the English were regarded as "little lords" and eccentricity had free reign".

Express - "CORFU should be preparing itself for an influx of British tourists, because after ITV’s new drama The Durrells is screened tonight, everybody in the country will want to relocate to the Greek island, just as the real-life Durrell family did in 1935".

Richard Waters in The Independent

Did Gerald Durrell Have The Corfu Blues? My blog posting from August 2010, about Gerald Durrell's feature article on Corfu, Sunday Times, January 1988

A review by Chitra Ramaswamy, The Guardian

Extract -"The mellow between-the-wars world of The Durrells is a relentlessly charming and only ever mildly offensive place in which the locals are welcoming, the poverty character-building, angry monks can be placated with a cigarette, and the frustrations of a single mother alone in a foreign land with vile children (not Gerry, he’s adorable) are down to the fact that “mother needs sex”. It is essentially like watching a mash-up of The Darling Buds of May and The Railway Children: gentle wish-you-were-here fare, the kind that makes tourist boards rub their hands together and the rest of us wonder why holidays never look remotely like it".


NB No longer the ideal destination if you're "cash-strapped" or an economic migrant...

*****

A different story on Lesbos

Euronews report