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Chateauvallon

DISEMBARK, IF you will, upon the verdant shores of Gaul where wine grows on trees, cocktail glasses chink on the hour every hour, and onions are worn as earrings. Here, the rich play hard, the very rich play harder, and the richest of all play Chris De Burgh. Welcome to CHATEAUVALLON, a readymade Dallas for the European Community, with feuding clans, press barons, gabbling women and gargling men. And it’s all for you on Channel 4. Except it’s in French. And you can watch either an appallingly dubbed version, or a clunking-subtitled one. A smash hit on the other side of La Manche. Mashed shit over here.

3 Comments

3 Comments

  1. Joanne Gray

    February 8, 2017 at 4:15 pm

    I actually enjoyed this. I’d just started my French GCSE studies at the time, so watched both versions to help my studies. And the theme tune was rather catchy.

  2. David Smith

    February 8, 2017 at 10:31 pm

    I seem to remember the tres sophistiquee subtitles version was shown in a graveyard slot while the dubbed one was something like four o’clock in the afternoon for the daytime philistines 🙂

    I also remember Sarah Dunant on Did You See? snorting at how we could “already spot the [Dallas-style] stereotypes” simply because the patriarch character was called JJ Berg – totally overlooking the fact that the letters stood for Jean-Jacques, a fairly common French name after all, sheesh 🙁

    Altogether now for the feem toon – “Puissance et gloire”…

  3. George White

    February 11, 2018 at 3:22 pm

    The lead actress was in a car crash and ended up in a vegetative state, so it was ended.

    Featured a lot of Italian exploitation people, like Luc Merenda, star of various Eurocrime tosh and 1973 giallo Torso, Raymond Pellegrin, a one-time Napoleon who ended up in Bud Spencer movies and Barbar Cupisti, stage of Stagefright 1987.

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