Charlie Bird in the Amazon

Keedowah

Watching this on RTE one now. Have to say they could have someone else doing the show - could have easily found someone a bit more adventurous imho.

He is talking a bit too news-like!

SoSueMe

He still talks as if he is a newsreader/reporter. He has no screen presence.

Keedowah

his wingeing is getting to me a bit now.

SoSueMe

I only saw the trailers and knew I could watch that smug...

mike65

Listening to his puff piece interview on Ryan Tubridy this morning I knew it was going to be crap.

Mike.

SoSueMe

Maybe he will get an insect bite and cry.

crosstownk

Charlie Bird is RTE's 'sensation' reporter. And all the faults that go with being just that.

CLADA

Keedowah wrote:

could have easily found someone a bit more adventurous imho.

yeah, this is the man who laughed in the face of death while reporting on the Iraq war from......SAUDI ARABIA!!!

starman100

Saw second half of this and I thought it was useless.

Could have been done really well if they stuck Charlie in the middle of the Amazonian jungle for a few weeks with all the teeming wild life but oh no, keep him moving down the middle of the boring river and compress the whole trip into an hour.

How I wished to see a swarm of piranha take chunks out of his waxy white arse when he was taking his dip.....:D

TempestSabre

SoSueMe wrote:

He still talks as if he is a newsreader/reporter. He has no screen presence.

Thats what I thought. Nice quality to the camera's though. They must have bought some new gear or something.

ElNino

What an ego! We saw more of Charlie on camera than of the Amazon. If Charlie had stayed off camera and just narrated then it could have been an interesting documentary and they could have concentrated on the stunning Amazon scenery.

godtabh

Why does RTE pay some one like this to go on holidays? Such a waste of money.

FlutterinBantam

kearnsr wrote:

Why does RTE pay some one like this to go on holidays? Such a waste of money.

Bad news for you Kearnsr. RTE don't pay ...you and I do!!!

Now I saw the trailers and heard the promo on the radio and within ,well 3 nano seconds, I said to mesell "Flutthers auld son,give that one a frikken wide berth.

Charlie said he badgered his boss to let him do this.His boss should have said "No probs Chuck,pony up the exers an away you go horse!!"

From the previous posts I gather it was a load of cr ap,but listening to Liveline Duffy is doing his usual spinning of the callers to say it was great.

I'l take the Boards verdict thank you.

LostinBlanch

I thought I was the only one thinking what a bleedin whinger he is, then I heard Ray Darcy reading out comments about him.

It's too cold, whinge.
It's too high, whinge.
It's too humid, whinge.
My tummy hurts, whinge.
There's creepy crawlies in the jungle, whinge.
There's a creepy crawlie in my tent, whinge.
There's mosquitos here, whinge.
I want to go home, whinge.


Michael Palin he ain't.

hot fuss

On the contrary, it's not getting a good review on Liveline at the moment - the complete opposite!

Anyway, it was hilarious! How to moan your way down the Amazon..

My favourite quote..

Charlie Bird to a dolphin, while feed it.. "that's my willie. I know I'm 56 but I still need it" - hilarious!

empirix

Didn't see this, but had a breakfast(well he watched me) on Phi Phi island in Thailand last year, when he was over for the tsunami anniversary, i actually had left Phi Phi the year previously and missed the tsunami by 3 days. Nice man but he was acting lke a reporter at breakfast too and we were only having a chat, his camera man wasn't hacking the humidity at all lugging around the big camera lol. To be honest, Charlie is a on the spot "serious" issue reporter, had a feeling the amazon thing would suck

empirix

Didn't see this, but we had breakfast(well he watched me) on Phi Phi island in Thailand last year, when he was over for the tsunami anniversary, i actually had left Phi Phi the year previously and missed the tsunami by 3 days. Nice man but he was acting lke a reporter at breakfast too and we were only having a chat, his camera man wasn't hacking the humidity at all lugging around the big camera lol. To be honest, Charlie is a on the spot "serious" issue reporter, had a feeling the amazon thing would suck

FlutterinBantam

hot fuss wrote:

On the contrary, it's not getting a good review on Liveline at the moment - the complete opposite!

Anyway, it was hilarious! How to moan your way down the Amazon..

My favourite quote..

Charlie Bird to a dolphin, while feed it.. "that's my willie. I know I'm 56 but I still need it" - hilarious!

What... Duffy has a few plants who think Charlie is God!!!

Duffy himself is trying to con the punters to send him off again!!!!

Now he is excellent as an investigative reporter,but documentaries...noooo.

What will we see next? Anne Doyle discovers the Nile??? Bryan Dobson in Antartica.???

padi89

LostinBlanch wrote:

I thought I was the only one thinking what a bleedin whinger he is, then I heard Ray Darcy reading out comments about him.

It's too cold, whinge.
It's too high, whinge.
It's too humid, whinge.
My tummy hurts, whinge.
There's creepy crawlies in the jungle, whinge.
There's a creepy crawlie in my tent, whinge.
There's mosquitos here, whinge.
I want to go home, whinge.


Michael Palin he ain't.

Agree with all.It was embarassing to watch, i hope its never shown again.

Flukey

After the profile it has been getting today, I think it will be shown again. Many will be watching it based on the negative things, and many on the base of the positive things. I saw it last night. OK, David Attenborough he ain't, but it depends on what you were expecting.

If people were expecting a wildlife documentary, then they would have been disappointed. If they were expecting a travel programme, they'd have been somewhat disappointed too. It did focus more on Charlie himself than the Amazon. So if you were looking for what it is like as an individual to go to these places, you'd have got something out of it. He did whinge a bit and his language was a bit choice at times. Defintely not the confident and accomplished reporter and journalist that we normally see. I enjoyed it. I suppose there would have been more that could have been done it with it, but I think it worked. There were some photos on the RTE website from his trip, some from scenes shown in the programme and some that were not. I was online while watching it, so I was looking at them at the same time.

godtabh

FlutterinBantam wrote:

Bad news for you Kearnsr. RTE don't pay ...you and I do!!!

Sorry what I was trying to get across was why do RTE send out people like this a blow our money like this.

Mushy

He always sounds the same. He lives in my estate, inmistakeable tone in that voice. Myself and my brother just made a lot of jokes about the different things he ws moaning about. Still, wouldnt mind going to Manos though. Or the last place he was at. Must ask him what it was like whenever I see him

Danno

Good programme - had a bit of everything in it...
I was shocked to see the destruction of the amazon forest.

vallo

Danno wrote:

- had a bit of everything in it...

That was the problem, I thought.

A bit of moany old charlie on a mountain trek, moany old charlie camping in the jungle, moany old charlie saying he is scared ...
A bit of ecological information
A bit of history
A bit of school-boy charlie laughing at some g-strings (what was so hilarious about "2 for 5"?)
A bit of self-centred charlie getting a hair-cut, getting shaved etc
A bit of moany old charlie commenting on their basic hotel accomodation (I've slept in much worse rooms is various hostels around the world - what kind of sheltered existence has this guy lead?)
A bit of moany old charlie giving out about the food (that his long-suffering escorts were cooking for him)
A bit of a shot of a toucan, then some ants, then a sloth, then a croc

If moany old charlie was pushing to do this "project" himself, then someone badly needs to put him on a tighter rein. If RTE want to send a moany old codger into the wilderness to be uncomfortable for a few weeks then either send Bird onto an Irish "I'm a Celeb .." and allow the Irish public the pleasure of ensuring he gets up to his chin in creepy crawlies or send a proper presenter who has a bit of wit and intelligence on an expedition like this one.

2 low-points of the whole experience for me (don't know why I kept watching, I was mesmerised by its awfulness) were
1. when moany old charlie got another grown man to come over and extricate a creepy crawly from his mosquito net (surely only us girls are allowed to do that?) and
2. when his guide was bringing him into the jungle to find natural medicine for him and all he did was complain - I found his words "me no like" particularly grating

Hopefully this'll be the last such trip.

Miguel_Sanchez

TempestSabre wrote:

Thats what I thought. Nice quality to the camera's though. They must have bought some new gear or something.

It's not RTE's gear. An independent production company made the program, commissioned by RTE.

mike65

Liam Fays Sunday Times review

There were several scenes in Charlie Bird Explores the Amazon (RTE1, Thu) that are destined to become comedy classics in future blooper shows. Yet the most memorably comical moment was undoubtedly the sequence in which the roving newshound became a petrified scaredy-cat; immobilised on hands and knees at the threshold of his tent by the sight of an insect on his bed roll.

Using the kind of language one would associate more with a pirate’s parrot than the domesticated Bird, our hero called for the assistance of Martin, his tour guide. “Something big got in,” the reporter yelped, his bloodcurdling cries conjuring up images of a beast the size of a behemoth rather than, well, a moth.

As Martin fumbled for the bug before squelching it, Bird became almost hysterical. “He’s only a small thing but he’s not what I like,” he whimpered. “Oh Martin, get the f***ing thing out, would you!” Bird’s fear of creatures that creep or crawl might have been excusable if he hadn’t already revealed himself to be terrified of everything that swims, flies and grows. Throughout his ill-considered five-week trek down the Amazon, he cowered and cringed at almost every turn/

/As we know from his solipsistic coverage of international news events such as the Asian tsunami or the Pakistan earthquake, Bird has an unfortunate habit of treating natural disasters as though they had happened primarily to him. His ego is so large and vocabulary so limited, he can apparently think of no other way to convey the horror of a catastrophe than to tell us how it makes him feel.

Devoid of a grasp of history or sense of proportion, he frequently rushes into persistent troublespots to tell us he has never seen anything like it before, apparently oblivious of the fact that all too many people have.

Hopefully he won't be doing it again!

Mike.

1huge1

I never knew the guy was so grumpy
Was a interesting watch all the same

remember when he got beat up at the dublin riots last year

Muggy Dev

About twenty years ago I along with some of my then colleagues had the misfortune to be victims of a very large and serious armed robbery in Dublin.Apart from everyone being badly shaken,nobody was physically hurt.

Within 30 minutes of the Gardai arriving, a reporter and crew from RTE showed up.The reporter began pounding furiously on the front door,screaming at the top of his voice "I demand to speak to (name of CEO)". This hysterical ranting and banging went on for over 15 minutes. After about 10, a Garda Sargeant came over to me and reassuringly said "don't mind him,he's only an eejit"

It was C.B.

If RTE can be likened to a village,and I believe it can,then C.B. is the idiot in residence.

padi89

1huge1 wrote:

I never knew the guy was so grumpy
Was a interesting watch all the same

remember when he got beat up at the dublin riots last year

After all his moaning i would be very surprised if a hair on the guys head was touched, he is just too much of a little girl.

vallo

Frontline reporting "This is Charlie Bird reporting from unbelievable scenes of carnage on Dublin's main street ... ah look, the my good jacket is all ripped ... moan moan moan"