– Thais complain as BBC ‘reopens tsunami wounds’ by Jan McGirk:
The BBC says its forthcoming mini-series, Aftermath, is a “thought-provoking drama of loss, survival and hope”. But for many Thais who lost their families in the 2004 tsunami, the film-makers are reopening wounds.
Further outrage has greeted the decision to hire Thais to play corpses at a cut-rate pay of £6 a day for the series, to be broadcast later this year.
However:
But Robert Reynolds, who runs a charity for tsunami orphans in Krabi province, was incensed after discovering Western extras were routinely paid 1,400 baht [£20]. He says he wrote to executives at the prize-winning Kudos productions, demanding that they take care not to offend. “Thais lost everything,” he pointed out to The Nation. “They had no homes to go back to.”
Maybe this story is something that could be included in BBC Views Online’s Ten Things we didn’t know last week column next week – perhaps this is a true story even, unlike last week’s Labour con that Views Online so happily fell for.