Tuesday 10 July 2012

Country House Rescue -A mistake

You can't live your life without making the odd mistake and it seems now that I made a major one when I agreed to allow Country House Rescue to do a programme on us.  Lose some win some and we lost this one big time as our programme has certainly disproved the old adage 'That there is no such thing as bad publicity' wrong.

Allow me though to put things in perspective. Firstly for every one hour of  film shown on the TV there is nearly one hundred hours which lie on the cutting room floor. In other words -in simple language -it is all in the edit.

Secondly Simon Davis and his Director decided for reasons known only to them - to rubbish the house and our pricing  of events etc. They flagrantly hammed up scenes such as the one where Simon Davies pretends he has had to turn on three electric radiators in order to keep warm- it was actually a very warm night and one of those electric radiators is more than ample to heat a room. They refused to accept that houses such as ours are not hotels. We have no wish to be a hotel or to compete with them. We believe we offer something different which is the exclusive use of a great country house and that there are people who are willing to pay for such a unique experience. We had hoped Simon Davies would have some insight into helping us market our house. Instead he had no insight except to say 'go down market.' His idea of a 'pop up' cinema was frankly pathetic. In the local town you can enjoy a film in the comfort of an armchair with a drink in your hand at a superb cinema - why would anyone bother to pay good money to come to us and see an out of date film? OK maybe once for the novelty and because the TV cameras where present but not on a regular basis.

I could go on but I won't. As ever don't believe everything you see on the screen.