Newsgroup: it.politica.polo
Titolo: Per chi conosce l'inglese. Gli altri passino oltre.

Un interessante articolo del financial times:
MY ITALIAN TV HELL
Tobias Jones, "Financial Times" del 16 Gennaio
http://search.ft.com/search/article.html?id=030116006139
"A democracy can't exist", Karl Popper once wrote, "unless it has its
television under control." In Italy, though, the game's going the other
way. The television studio has already usurped the senate, soft porn has
replaced hard news. One of the biggest media players on the planet -
Silvio Berlusconi - has been our prime minister for the past 18 months,
and his palazzo televiso (his metaphorical "televisual palace") is only a
couple of moves from check-mating democracy.
So what does television look like in this new, "videocratic" world? What
- I asked myself a few weeks ago, as I kicked off my shoes, reclined on
my sofa in Parma and reached for the remote - is Italian TV really like?
Has Berlusconi, I wondered, really turned the frightening, fictional
worlds of 1984 and Citizen Kane into reality?
It's a Sunday afternoon, and I zap on RAI 1. The programme is called
Domenica-In. It's a cabaret show lasting for six hours. After only five
minutes I'm feeling drunk from the dizzying lights and dancing. I flick
to Channel 5 (one of Berlusconi's three Mediaset channels): Buona
Domenica. It looks exactly the same. Just as on RAI 1, the audience are
clapping wildly as some crooner sings old Sinatra songs. There are girls
in bikinis everywhere. Both are flagship programmes of the rival
networks, attracting millions of viewers every Sunday. To me, it looks
like something straight out of Benny Hill.
To familiarise yourself with the terrain of Italian TV, there is one key
word to learn: Canzonissima. It means, simply, "very song". It was, for
decades, the most important programme on Italian television, and has now
been replaced by dozens of derivatives. Singing, it's very obvious, is
the foundation stone of Italian television. The listings magazines even
publish the lyrics to the old hits so that you can sing along at home. It
makes TV appear like one long karaoke show, with comperes clicking their
fingers as the band springs to life. By far the most followed event on TV
is the San Remo festival in February, which serves up a week of syrupy
songs.
The following evening, about 7pm, I flick to Channel 5 again. This is the
prime-time quiz show, Passaparola. To understand this kind of show, there
are more key words to learn. Letterine "the little letters", Veline
"quick news flash", schedine "the little statistics": all are diminutive
"ine" descriptions of the bikini-clad women who start dancing erotically
at random intervals. Passaparola is a quiz show based on the alphabet,
hence the "little letters". As I'm watching, Gerry Scotti - the anodyne
host - is flirting with one of them and winking at the 8m viewers. Italy,
don't be in any doubt, is the land that feminism forgot.
Then something strange happens. As the show reaches its climax, Gerry
walks to the other side of the studio, with one of the show-girls under
his arm. "Dearest viewers," he says, "I've got a wonderful suggestion for
you." This is a "promotional message", 60 seconds of product placement
that interrupts every TV show. Normally the host is promoting grooming
products: cellulite solutions, hair removal, hair replacement.
Occasionally it's "shoes that breathe" or a "massaging mattress". Within
minutes of the "promotional message", there's an advertising break
proper. Filippo, a friend next to me on the sofa, grabs the remote and
rides through all the seven main channels: "Bingo!" he shouts: "all the
channels are on ad breaks!" There's nothing to watch. "You see", he says,
"the problem isn't that Italy has commercial television. It's that it has
only one half of commercial television: the commercials." As he says
this, he's shaking his head in despair: in front of us on screen is a
close-up of a woman's buttocks. They're wobbling as plastic pads send
electric shocks into her flesh for "slimming and toning perfection".
It often seems that, in Italy, there aren't advertisement breaks; there
are short programme breaks. Fifty seven per cent of all Italian
advertising budgets is spent on television (compared with 23 per cent in
Germany, and 33.5 per cent in the UK). Even RAI, the state-owned
television network - to whom I pay an annual licence fee of ?97 runs
adverts. All of which means that audience-chasing is crucial, and
programmes are designed for quantity not quality. "It's become a kind of
psychological dictatorship", says Gad Lerner, the most intelligent
anchorman on Italian TV. "The figures from Auditel [which measures
audience share] scare people into only producing these vulgar,
crowd-pulling programmes." Berlusconi, of course, owns Publitalia, the
company responsible for selling 60 per cent of advertising space on
Italian television.
Within a few days of starting my TV induction I can feel my brain turning
to custard. It's been cabaret and quiz shows all week. There seems to be
an obsession with singing and winning quick cash. And there are so many
chat shows such as Al Posto Tuo or Uomini e Donne that have sad lovers
screaming at each other. There's blanket coverage of football. If you
have satellite you can even watch your team training for the next game.
But - and this is the strange thing - there's nothing actually on. If
content is king, Italy is very much a republic. And so it becomes a sort
of self-reflexive hall of mirrors. Quiz shows ask questions such as:
"With the letter M, who presents the chat show Uomini e Donne?" Then on
that chat show, Maria De Filippi - the blonde Italian Oprah - will host
the quiz-master who asked the question. Then news programmes will run
long items on the marriage between De Filippi and Maurizio Costanzo, the
portly host of Buona Domenica who also hosts another chat show from
Monday to Friday. It is television feasting on its own tasteless
entrails.
The more you watch it, the more you realise that for all its "variety
shows", there's precious little variety. And, the most amazing thing, the
iconic men who launched Italian TV in the 1950s - Mike Buongiorno and
Raimondo Vianello - are still there, right in front of me as I write
this. It's the televisual equivalent of trasformismo: time moves on,
tastes change, but the players in the game remain exactly the same. As
with politicians, no television personality ever, ever slips off into
retirement, which means that Italy appears a sort of "geriatrocracy", run
by doddery old men.
There are, at least, hundreds of films on offer, but they wouldn't even
fit into the B-movie category: they're almost all oil-and-muscle action
movies starring Steven Segal or Chuck Norris. The TV series, too, seem
stuck in a time-warp: Colombo, Murder She Wrote, The Saint. That, as
patriotic Italians often complain, is the real problem. Italy, once the
artistic engine of the world, has become a mass importer of culture. The
country is one of Hollywood's most important markets, with the
consequence that nowadays many of Italy's most famous actors are its
dubbers.
Watching news programmes is even worse. This evening I was watching the
Italia Uno (Mediaset) news. "Celebrity gossip", smiles the newscaster,
"has become cultural this week". The news item is an interview with
Natalia Estrada - a Spanish bombshell - talking earnestly about her
"career" as a show-girl, and proudly announcing her imminent marriage to
Berlusconi's brother, Paolo. A couple of days later I decide to watch the
news on RAI 2. During the lead announcement, there's a slow-motion
picture of Berlusconi smiling. Violins are playing moving music. "The
prime minister", the newscaster announces, "has become a grandfather for
the second time."
Most Italians are acutely embarrassed by it all. Many will say that their
TV is volgare or else fa schifo: "it's disgusting". Signora Ciampi, wife
of the politically neutral and widely admired President of the Republic,
last year made headlines by declaring it all deficiente: "half-witted".
It's nothing new. Decades ago Pier Paolo Pasolini spoke of TV's influence
as a sort of "cultural genocide", wiping away all traces of what makes
Italians so noble: the intelligence and generosity, the Catholicism and
conversation. Umberto Eco and Dario Fo have moaned repeatedly and
eloquently about the televisual state of the nation. The enigma is how
Italy - home to the most creative people on earth - ever produced such a
leviathan. Who is responsible for this rubbish?
The reply of those pop-culture critics is almost always anthropological.
Italy is, they say, a visual rather than a literary country. It has
produced the best art, and many of the greatest films, in the western
world. With a few notable exceptions (Dante, Boccaccio and so on) almost
all Italy's cultural icons - from Michelangelo to Fellini - are the
product of visual, rather than verbal, genius. That visual culture, that
obsession with understanding and admiring beauty, means that television
is, like fashion, the fulcrum of Italian life. The average adult watches
television for more than four hours a day; even when you go out to a
restaurant there will be a TV set slung in the corner.
In Italy no other medium - print, publishing, audio - reaches even the 50
per cent thresh old of "info-penetration" into daily life.
By now, the TV set is so ubiquitous that it's nicknamed the focolare
domestico, the "domestic fire". It's the warm glow around which family
and friends gather; especially, of course, in Italy, a land where three
generations often share the same living room. That, in fact, is the
second anthropological explanation for TV saturation: the emphasis on
family life paradoxically increases TV viewing because it's the only
thing many relatives have in common. The easiest way to pass an afternoon
with your grandmother is to watch Buona Domenica.
The other explanation for Italian TV is historical: there has always been
a bear-hug between Italian politics and television. Lottizzazione -
"carve up" - describes the way television channels became, in the old
days, fiefdoms of the political parties. Until the early 1990s, the three
RAI channels were directly controlled by the three main parties. The
Christian Democrats pulled the strings at RAI 1, the Socialists
controlled RAI 2, the Communists RAI 3. The RAI Berlusconi inherited in
2001 had obvious left-wing leanings. The real complaint against
Berlusconi isn't that he's changed the rules of the game by conflating
politics and television; it's simply that he's won the old game so very,
very convincingly. And he triumphed through a piece of tactical genius.
He turned the tables on the old, political guard by deciding to colonise
politics through television, rather than vice versa.
Berlusconi's TV empire also owes its rise to an anomalous business
context: in the 1980s, when Berlusconi built himself into a media mogul,
commercial television in Italy was almost totally unregulated.
He has duly made TV in his own image: a slick salesman who once worked as
a singer on a cruise ship, he has turned TV into endless advertisements
sandwiched between the cabaret. (Even the listings magazine he owns is
called "Smiles and Songs"). A man enthralled by the US, he has bought the
rights to thousands of American films and soap operas. He has turned
television into an ideological vacuum, in which the medium really has
become the message. The result, of course, is that the mogul has become
the prime minister.
There are, though, areas of optimism. The other side of the TV equation -
the viewer - is very different in Italy. Italians watch not passively, in
silence and concentration (as in Britain), but actively. Watch TV with
friends or family and you realise the box is just another relative:
ever-present, but often ignored, invariably - as in all Italian
conversations - interrupted. "You're a cretin" is the usual shout in the
direction of the TV and its smug "celebrities". Italian viewers are
simply less supine than their Anglo-American counterparts. Also, if you
watch television after 1am you'll see some of the best programmes
available: educational documentaries, foreign films, in-depth news
analysis. Then there's "La 7", a national channel launched recently -
with Gad Lerner as its figurehead - to challenge the duopoly of
RAI-Mediaset by going up-market.
In addition, since every Italian city claims to be a "capital", there are
more than 600 local channels. Many are incredibly sophisticated and
refined. Every Sunday night I work as a football pundit for Teleducato,
one of Parma's local channels. Our programme is simply sports chat and if
you cough the backdrop falls over. And yet, each week when I leave the
studio, I walk past the city's finest opera critics, getting ready to
render their verdicts on the evening's opera. When I get home 10 minutes
later, I see the three men on screen, swigging wine as they would at home
and earnestly talking about the soprano from the current run of
Rigoletto. Such intelligence, of course, would be immediately banished
from RAI or Mediaset.
These are critical weeks for the future of Italian television.
Berlusconi's communications minister has just announced a new draft law
proposing a radical rewriting of the media laws (abolishing the 30 per
cent ceiling for ownership of any single media sector, lifting the ban on
cross-media ownership and preparing the way for the privatisation of RAI
for January 2004). At the same time, three out of five of the directors
of RAI (representing the state's three terrestrial and seven satellite
channels) have just resigned, apparently fed up with political
interference and poor programming.
By now, Berlusconi really does have a near-monopoly of the mass media.
Anyone who says otherwise is simply burying his head in the television.
He recently railed against three presenters on RAI who had criticised
him, and their programmes were taken off the air. Blob, an inspired
programme that satirises the tele-political powers that be, was also
cancelled recently when it dedicated a special edition to the prime
minister. "But the thing that really frightens me", says Gad Lerner,
"isn't that censorship is a diktat from above, it's that it's servility
from below. Everyone working in television knows that, for the next five
or seven years, their career will depend upon Berlusconi, and they grovel
accordingly."
As if to illustrate the point, a few minutes ago I finally found a film
worth watching. It was a Hitchcock film on Rete 4 (Mediaset). Just as the
climax arrived, as the pistol appeared from behind the curtain, there was
a scroll along the bottom of the screen, ruining the tension: "One year
of achievement", it read; "All the highlights of Berlusconi's speech
immediately after this film". And that's the strange thing. Berlusconi's
political movement, Forzismo, might be vaguely dangerous for democracy,
but for television it's simply disastrous.
Tobias Jones has lived in Italy for four years. His diary of life abroad,
"The Dark Heart of Italy", is published by Faber this month.

 MY ITALIAN TV HELL
Articolo pessimo. Che la TV italiana faccia pena lo sanno tutti. Che le cose
stiano come dice questo signore (che non sa neanche inquadrare trasmissioni
e personaggi in una linea cronologica) è davvero ridicolo... Ma c'è ancora
bisogno di parlare di questo articolo?

 bisogno di parlare di questo articolo?
Pessimo?
Questo e' un giornalista del FT.
E il fatto che la TV italiana faccia pena si sa a chi bisogna imputarlo.

 ha scritto nel messaggio
news:b0pq63$ljk$1...@fata.cs.interbusiness.it...

Vedrai che tobia si candiderà nelle file del pds, come la "obiettiva
equidistante imparziale
giornalista inglese" dezulueta.
Dicevi: "è necessario parlarne ancora?"
Ma certo, il tobia deve pur propagandare la propria candidatura...
Ciao
GZ

LECCALUNGO LECCA BENE

 Ma certo, il tobia deve pur propagandare la propria candidatura...
Ma non dire fregnacce. Uno che lavora al FT ha di meglio da fare. Siamo
noi che in televisione non abbiamo di meglio da guardare :-)
-- -----------------------------------------------------
Luca Logi - Firenze - Italy        e-mail: 
ll...@dada.it

 Ma certo, il tobia deve pur propagandare la propria candidatura...
Tu perche' parli? Sei un ignorante e non hai capito niente di quel testo.
Torna a fare la cuccia e sbattimi la faccia in culo.

 GZ
Ciao, ebraicista della domenica!
Come da oggetto, caporaluccio!

,in
it.politica.polo ha scritto:

--
Mah. Proprio stamani seguivo una trasmissione (nn ricordo su quale rete, faccio
sempre molta zapping) in cui se ne spiegavano i motivi; principalmente, la
riduzione dei costi acquistando formati all'estero piuttosto che producendoli in
Italia. Del resto, si affermava anche la vandita all'estero di prodotti nostrani
(citata "c'e posta per te"; il che non fa ben presagire neppure per la media
culturale della TV estera.
Sara' una forma di "antipatia" per il proprietario ??
******
Merlin
~~~~~~~
KINGDOM OF CAMELOT
Da:  Merlin Wizard
"Qui mores hominum multorum vidit et urbes"
______
On replaying del "S"

 ha scritto nel messaggio
news:b0pq63$ljk$1...@fata.cs.interbusiness.it...

Se serve a destare coscienze televisive anestetizzate, si
Altrimenti guardati "La palestra"
Ciao
Stefano

> Se serve a destare coscienze televisive anestetizzate, si
Se destare le coscienze televisive significa scrivere un articolo in larga
parte sbagliato direi che possiamo anche farne a meno. Che diano a me il
compenso del signore del FT e raggiungo lo stesso scopo (dire che la TV
italia fa schifo) dicendo le cose giuste...

 Ma non dire fregnacce. Uno che lavora al FT ha di meglio da fare.
dillo alla dezulueta.

 dillo alla dezulueta.
Che infatti non lavorava al FT



sforzati un po' che ci arrivi anche te....