Newsgroup: it.fan.culo
Titolo: Facciamo sempre una bellissima figura

Dal Financial Times, di Tobias Jones
"My Italian TV hell"
"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and has now been replaced by dozens of derivatives.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
&#8721;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.

"My Italian TV hell"
Dì la verità Carlo, te lo sei letto per intero e condividi tutte le
affermazioni di questo signore?
Su quale numero del FT l'hai trovato? In quale sezione era collocato
(cultura, spettacolo, politica estera)?
O

 says Gad Lerner, the most intelligent anchorman on Italian TV
Ah, allora.
Magari se non usasse cosi' spesso la televisione per le sue ripicche 
personali...
D.

"My Italian TV hell"
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 "My Italian TV hell"
marxisti. Lo dice Maurizio Gasparri.
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