The world from my window

The second series of The Durrells started last night, bringing with it the warmth of Corfu and that wonderful, feel-good factor so important for Sunday nights on the telly. If you love the show and all things Greek, imagine what it would be like if you moved there yourself. That's exactly what Mr Grigg and I did for a year. We even had our own Spiros protecting our backs. You can find out more in the May edition of Saga magazine . And if you can't wait for episode two, here's a link to my book, Good Morning Corfu: A Year on a Greek Island . You can download it straight to your Kindle and it's also available in paperback. 'Just like the film Mamma Mia, you'll want to get on the next plane and be there.' 'Inspired me to follow my dream and do just what Maddie did and go spend a year on the beautiful island of Corfu.' 'If you have ever wanted to escape a place,job or relationship, if you love Greece or just want a holiday read, I recommend i...

Along with millions of others last night, I sat down and watched the final episode of Broadchurch . The difference was, though, I was at a live screening of the show at Bridport, in the town where much of the series was made. More details of that here . It was a shocking denouement, with no real winners, but (I thought) plenty of hope, right at the end. Broadchurch has made a great impact on my part of Dorset, and very much for the good. Writer Chris Chibnall has been embraced as 'one of our own', and we are grateful to him and his team for creating such an intelligent, beautifully-acted and shot series. It's gripped the nation, and rightly so. In the hands of others, the storyline of this last series, in particular, could have been very tacky. But it was handled with extreme sensitivity and we didn't feel bad for wanting to know who 'did' it. We wanted justice for Trish. I didn't correctly identify the culprit (I thought it was Trish's hu...

Sitting in a railway station...got a ticket to my destination. So, here I am, sitting in an old railway carriage. It's at Station Kitchen , West Bay, the home of Broadchurch and today, for one day only, Channel 5's  The Gadget Show . I'm being interviewed by Jon Bentley about the pros and cons of two very different mobile phones. I'm not really a techie person but p roducer/director Robert Murray emailed me out of the blue and asked me  to blog about the whole experience. Along with a photographer and a gamer, I'm being asked to test out a cheap phone and a not-so-cheap phone and see what results I get. This photo was taken on the Honor 6X.  And here's Jon, in the same pose (and researcher George, looking a bit bored), in a picture taken on the Samsung Galaxy S7 Edge.  You can judge the results for yourself. I'm also meant to be doing a little bit of blogging on each phone, having downloaded Blogger and WordPress apps. To be honest, I...

Broadchurch  fever is gripping the nation. Well, at least it seems like that around these parts. I'm sorry not to have written about anything else for The World from my Window over the last few weeks, but it's taking over my life. As part of my day job at Bridport Electric Palace , I've been involved in persuading series writer Chris Chibnall - soon to be chief writer for Doctor Who - to come along for a question and answer session following the live screening of the last-ever episode on Easter Monday, 17 April. The event sold out within days and everyone is very excited. It's a charity screening in aid of    Dorset Rape Crisis Support Centre and The Dorset Sexual Assault Referral Centre (SARC). Both organisations were consulted extensively throughout Chris’s writing process and on in to production. You can read more about that here . In the Grigg household, we're hooked on  Broadchurch .  I almost choked on my secret chocolate stash at the s...

After the La La Land madness at last night's Oscars ceremony, in which the hit musical movie was given Best Picture award by mistake instead of Moonlight , here in the UK we'll be sitting down tonight to watch our own award-winning drama. It's the third and final and long-awaited series of Broadchurch .  In Dorset, this programme is particularly special, because much of it was filmed at West Bay, with its wonderful layer-cake cliffs. When the first series of Broadchurch was broadcast on ITV in early 2013, I was away in Greece, having exchanged my life in west Dorset for a year in Corfu. Writer Chris Chibnall has described the show as his love letter to the area he is proud to call home. And being so far away from my own home, I was desperate to see the programme everyone was talking about. When I got hold of the DVD box set, I understood. It's not comfortable viewing but it's utterly compelling. Here's a personal reflection which I wrote about for...

One of my all-time musical heroes is eighty five today. Take a bow, Mr John Williams . You are epic. By Chris Devers (Flickr: DSC_0937.JPG) [CC BY-SA 2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons This man, this incredible man, has provided the soundtrack to so many wonderful films which have become the soundtracks to our lives. Of course, there's Star Wars and Jaws and ET and Indiana Jones . He also wrote the music to  Schindler's List, Lincoln (now there's a film for current times), Saving Private Ryan,   Memoirs of a Geisha, Home Alone and many, many more .  The man is a legend, bringing classical musical to the masses through these fantastically atmospheric film scores. How can anyone not like the theme to Jurassic Park ? So when Mr Grigg and I were travelling travelling up to Heathrow last year (on our way to Colombia, don't you know) and heard a plug on the radio for a special Radio 2  Friday Night Is Mus...

I was trawling through the internet the other day, looking for something specific, when I came across something completely different. (That's the thing with the internet. It can take you down rabbit holes - some of which land you, like Alice, in Wonderland while others take you to a painting by Hieronymus Bosch.) Anyway, I came across a number of videos that formed part of Forever Archive, a project I helped research back in 2012.  Scarily, I was the subject of one of the inteviews, as they ran out of people to film. Here's the blurb: In 2012, the Forever Archive project set out to increase awareness of archive film and its relevance to our lives today, and to put across that the idea of archive film is a continuous process – the films from a hundred years ago are a fascinating insight into the way we used to live and similarly, the films we create today will be of huge interest in another hundred years. Archive film is not something alien and remote, locked into a...