Last Friday, during my lunch break, I started watching the first part of Joanna Lumley’s Greek Odyssey, a ‘documentary’ in which Lumley goes around Greece at ITV1’s expense, making increasingly stupid, inaccurate and clueless comments about the country, its culture and history.
In episode 1, she started in Athens before making her way round to Evia, the Mani penisula and then up to Olympia. During this time, she came up with many exciting ‘facts’: the Persians invaded Greece 1,500 years ago (that probably came as news to the Byzantine Empire which was occupying Greece at the time), that the Greeks created the Acropolis in Athens (they built the Parthenon on the Acropolis, but not the Acropolis itself) or that in modern Greece it’s illegal to throw plates in restaurants so now they throw flowers instead – actually, you can break plates if the restaurant has a licence to so. If you’re very good, I won’t post the pictures of me dancing the Zorba dance while we smash plates in a Greek restaurant as proof.
Anyway, so incensed did I become that I ended up live Tweeting the whole thing. Others joined in. This is our story.
PS Should you wish to watch the episode, it’s available on the ITVPlayer.
