Not many dead: how to report Greece's financial crisis

We hit upon the not entirely original idea of making a tv portrait of a small Greek town struggling through this economic crisis.

The town we chose was Lavrio, about an hour south of Athens and, it turned out, home to the silver mines from which the first drachma coins were cast, some 2,500 years ago.

“TV gold,” as some in our picture- hungry business might put it, without a hint of irony.

Despite the silver mines,  filming Greece’s economic crisis wasn’t easy. The sun often shines here. Greeks laugh a lot, despite everything. Everybody walking along the Lavrio waterfront looked as if they were on holiday when the reality is that many can’t get a job.

Images we filmed had to be deciphered; the sheen of normality stripped away. The men in the coffee shop – were they lingering over a single coffee a lot longer now, perhaps because their pensions had been cut by thirty percent?

The charter yachts lying becalmed in the harbour. Were they all tied to the dockside because the German tourists were no longer coming, having heard they were being blamed for the crisis? It turned out that was right.

How come so many cars were clogging the streets – perhaps they were being driven by Greeks who had stopped paying car insurance? How many cars would have been repossessed by the banks which issued loans to buy them, only the banks have run out of space to put the cars?

And so on.

The statistics are startling – unemployment in Lavrio is about forty per cent. A quarter of Greek companies have gone out of business in the last three years.  The minimum wage is set to go down by 22 per cent. Greece’s recession has already lasted five years.

But how to show it, when irate Greeks have stopped protesting outside parliament because they have run out of politicians to protest against?

The other dilemma we faced in portraying this crisis and making viewers care about it was the absence of people who are starving. I have reported from Somalia and Ethiopia and I know what hunger looks like. Greece, of course, is thankfully nothing like that.

But the dilemma arises because Greeks are trying to tell the rest of the Eurozone they cannot cope with any more austerity.  So, to put it bluntly, why should we believe them if nobody in Lavrio is starving?

The problem, of course, is that Greeks have experienced a European lifestyle it turns out they couldn’t afford, a standard of living their grandparents could only dream of, and losing that is an enormous psychological blow.

The “birthplace of democracy” tag disguises a modern day nation which would feel small and insecure without Euro membership.

“Greeks are tough, we are Spartans, we can cope with this” is something I have heard often about the crisis, but in the next breath comes a refusal to cope with it at all.

So sensitive are they to criticism from foreign media that some people I met assumed I would portray them as lazy and refused to talk.

“Of course we are lazy,” said one businessman off camera. ” How could we not be when it is often too hot to work?”

We did meet a man who lived in a tumbledown shack with his wife and five children. He had managed to find two days’ work a week stacking newspapers. He earned 35 Euros a day, but then had to spend 15 Euros of that on petrol.

The only way he could survive was on benefits, and they were threatened with cuts.

“I would just ask Europe”, he said, “to help poor people .. and to stop trying to take from people who dont have.”

He showed me his electricity and his water bills, which he hadn’t paid in years. Three days ago his water was cut off, but then reinstated after the local Communist Party intervened.

Has anybody had their electricity disconnected in Lavrio, I asked? Political activists we met couldn’t think of anyone, because though hundreds of final warnings have been sent out, local politicians stop it from happening.

But what was most striking about my time in Lavrio was the almost total denial of the “choice” David Cameron and others now say Greece must make: whether to stay in or out of the Euro.

Many Greeks genuinely believe they can have their cake and eat it: stay in the Euro with austerity significantly watered down. And maybe they are right. In this battle of wills, perhaps the Germans will blink first and decide that having Greece inside the Euro tent is better than having them out, even if the cost either way is immense.

In ancient times the Greeks conquered Troy with a wooden horse, packed with soldiers. Now they are inside the Eurozone, many have no intention of leaving it. Instead, they prefer to believe they can keep the way of life they have grown accustomed to and have it financed with other people’s money.