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Rating: Summary: Just Awful! It is amateurish, self-absorbed and useless Review: A total waste of money! Most of the video is of Rick Steves - Rick Steves going into pubs, Rick Steves having breakfast, Rick Steves at the tourist information booth, Rick Steves on the Thames, Rick Steves looking for tickets to the Edinburgh festival, etc. If you want a DVD of Rick Steves, this is for you. This is the kind of video your uncle Charlie could have made (and he would have done a better job).What do see in London? Some quick exteriors of St. Paul's, the Tower of London, and Parliament along with some interior museum shots. The cruise on the Thames highlights (you guessed it) - Rick Steves. Steves misses many London highlights and somehow manages to make London appear boring. Steves spends an inordinate amount of time on the obvious - how to operate your camera, how to exchange money, how to find the tourist center, etc, etc. What a wasted effort! I found little of interest here and it is painful to watch as it is 90% filler material. A very sad offering that reflects poorly on Rick Steves and Questar. I will not buy another product in this series.
Rating: Summary: An Ego Trip for Rick Steves Review: I am giving this a low grade because Rick Steves appears in nearly every scene. I would much prefer to view England with a background voice-over instead of watching Rick Steves chatting people up and feeding his face. His book, however, is truly helpful and filled with wonderful advice.
Rating: Summary: An Ego Trip for Rick Steves Review: I purchased this DVD in conjunction with purchasing Rick Steves' "Great Britian 2002" book in preparation of a trip to London with a weekend getaway to Bath and the Cotswolds. I found the DVD to be somewhat of a resource, but not as much as the book. As the other reviewer mentioned, the two main flaws of this DVD is that it spends way too little time on London itself (I ended up spending eight days in London and *still* didn't see everything), while wasting time on other things such as how to take photos without a tripod or flash. What this really seems to be is a combination of three of his PBS shows, one that touches on London and Scotland, one that continues in Scotland and covers Ireland, and another that goes over Wales and the English countryside. There are DVD "bonus materials" of Blackpool (kind of useless), Stratford-upon-Avon, and Blenheim Palace (just north of Oxford). To get what I needed out of the DVD, I found myself skipping around to different chapters and fast forwarding through parts of others. Despite these problems, I do still recommend this because you get a 90+ minute video ... and because it's on DVD and you can skip to what you need, it still can be useful to everyone. Some people may not care about going to Bath like I did, so they could just skip to Belfast if that is what they were interested in. It was also nice to come back from my trip and see everything again, including a pub in Broad Campden we ate at that I didn't even realize was on the DVD. What I don't understand is that I have seen Rick's show on PBS, and I have seen episodes which dealt entirely on London, so I don't know why more on the city wasn't included. Perhaps he needed to come up with two DVDs, one on London and other sights in England, and another on Scotland, Ireland and Wales. Perhaps this production is a victim of trying to do too much in one title, rather than giving proper treatment to everything covered. I would still buy this DVD, but realize that it might not have everything you want, it might have things you don't want, and you'll definitely have to supplement it with a Great Britian guidebook and possibly on on London itself.
Rating: Summary: Has its faults, but still a good value for its price Review: I purchased this DVD in conjunction with purchasing Rick Steves' "Great Britian 2002" book in preparation of a trip to London with a weekend getaway to Bath and the Cotswolds. I found the DVD to be somewhat of a resource, but not as much as the book. As the other reviewer mentioned, the two main flaws of this DVD is that it spends way too little time on London itself (I ended up spending eight days in London and *still* didn't see everything), while wasting time on other things such as how to take photos without a tripod or flash. What this really seems to be is a combination of three of his PBS shows, one that touches on London and Scotland, one that continues in Scotland and covers Ireland, and another that goes over Wales and the English countryside. There are DVD "bonus materials" of Blackpool (kind of useless), Stratford-upon-Avon, and Blenheim Palace (just north of Oxford). To get what I needed out of the DVD, I found myself skipping around to different chapters and fast forwarding through parts of others. Despite these problems, I do still recommend this because you get a 90+ minute video ... and because it's on DVD and you can skip to what you need, it still can be useful to everyone. Some people may not care about going to Bath like I did, so they could just skip to Belfast if that is what they were interested in. It was also nice to come back from my trip and see everything again, including a pub in Broad Campden we ate at that I didn't even realize was on the DVD. What I don't understand is that I have seen Rick's show on PBS, and I have seen episodes which dealt entirely on London, so I don't know why more on the city wasn't included. Perhaps he needed to come up with two DVDs, one on London and other sights in England, and another on Scotland, Ireland and Wales. Perhaps this production is a victim of trying to do too much in one title, rather than giving proper treatment to everything covered. I would still buy this DVD, but realize that it might not have everything you want, it might have things you don't want, and you'll definitely have to supplement it with a Great Britian guidebook and possibly on on London itself.
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