Crossed digits

I've spent too much time today trying to get our television in the kitchen to work. Or, to be more precise, trying to get our NEW television in the kitchen to work. Everything was fine until a few months ago. We'd sit and eat our lunch while cooks showed us how to tart up ten euros-worth of groceries, then watch the 1.30 news with a mixture of anguish, irritation and incredulous hilarity, turning it off when the sports news started. A few hours later, we'd turn it on again, while cooking, and sometimes eating, dinner, to see if the official stories had changed. Italian TV journalism, for someone used to the way things are done in the UK - one human interest story, ideally involving children, a rapid skimming of the day in politics with a couple of sound bites and a brief nod at the rest of the world (the States or a really big disaster in one of those places that otherwise don't exist), all of it dosed with knowing irony and pseudo-detachment, except for the bits with children, which would make a Hallmark rhymester cringe -, compared to all this, I repeat, Italian TV journalism is, well, too much information.

The BBC, in its wisdom, does the sifting first, to remove their notion of what constitutes the chaff from their notion of what constitutes the wheat. The RAI, in its sublime contempt, removes all the wheat it can find, lets the chaff ferment and thrive until it has a life of its own, then shovels it through the screen and into the homes of the telespectators, as they're still, touchingly, known, less to make things grow than to suffocate them at the moment of conception. What makes the two main news programmes, TG1 and TG2, interesting, though, despite all their directors' efforts, is that news of a sort gets through. Because something is always more than nothing, even the most self-serving and obscurantist something. Umberto Eco once pointed out that conspiracy theorists should read the financial news with more attention because all they need to know is there, and the same might be said of Italian TV journalism. Reading between, above, below and despite the lines, there's little that isn't, in some way, said.

So, everything was fine until a month or so ago, when the process of moving from analogue to digital TV began in Lazio, where I live. The first step involved the shift of two channels - one state, one owned by Berlusconi - to digital, immediately depriving us of TG2, the news programme that, unofficially, 'belonged' to the Northern League. Pazienza, we thought. We can live without Bossi and his green-shirted cronies crusading against minarets and kebab joints. We might not even need a television in the kitchen. We'll wait until the whole shebang goes digital. Which it did, a couple of weeks ago. We stared at the fizzing lines for a while before giving in and deciding that what we really needed wasn't just a decoder, a trifling expense I deeply resented, but a brand-new telly, a much larger expense that, for some reason, I resented far less.

Off we went to our local electrical goods emporium (TRONY - NON CI SONO PARAGONI!) to buy one. Flat screen, the thickness of a Dan Brown, 26 inches. These days TVs programme themselves. All you have to do is sit and watch. Except that it couldn't find the channels, or not very well, and even the ones it did find looked small and sounded tinny. We weren't happy. We needed something bigger, and better. We packed it back in its box and went to exchange it. For something bigger, and better. Trony is the only retail outlet in Fondi that looks as though it might belong somewhere else, in a country where retail rules. The prices are reasonable, the choice wide, the credit facilities all too readily available. Even the people who work there are courteous and informed (I mean this). But even Trony was a little stressed out as the entire populace of Fondi (or its grandmother) queued, decoder in hand, to get their mojos home and working. Romero would have loved it.

We now have a 32 inch Samsung, a thing of great elegance and beauty. We've had it since Saturday. Unfortunately, despite being auto-programmed half a dozen times a day, and sworn at, and coaxed, its gleaming black screen remains unsullied by images of any kind. There was a brief, exhilarating parenthesis when a local channel transmitting highlights from this summer's international folk dancing festival broke through the darkness to reveal some meaty grass-skirted Polynesians air-rowing their way across a creaking stage. Apart from that, nada. So this morning we called the aerial man. And, as is usual when confronted by an expert, I learnt all kinds of thing I hadn't known. I learnt, for example, that my aerial was laughable out of date. I learnt that aerials necessarily have an alimentatore (don't ask) and that I didn't have the faintest idea where ours was, although it's most probably behind a large kitchen dresser filled with glasses. This will have to be moved. I learnt that, even with Sky, the RAI and many commercial channels will be unavailable. I learnt that if I wanted to continue watching cooks vie with each other over pasta-making machines and Daniele Capezzone, currently the vilest of all Berlusconi's mouthpieces, strut his mendacious self-serving stuff (and I do, despite myself, want this), I would have to spend something like 200 euros, on top of the cost of the new TV. I learnt that I could extend my Sky contract to a second TV for a modest monthly sum and a less modest sum up front. I learnt that whatever I decided I wanted I would have to wait some days before I got it. Learning isn't painless.

I'll keep you informed.

PS I've just noticed that I've used the word self-serving to talk about Italian institutions twice. I wonder why.

Allegria

Well, Mike Bongiorno's dead. If you've never heard of him you don't live in Italy; if you do and still haven't heard of him, you were walled into a television-free zone many decades ago and have since been denied all contact with popular culture. Either way, you've missed very little. Bongiorno was poached from state tv by Berlusconi when he set up his first private channels, and worked for him uninterruptedly until last year, when his ratings fell and Papi disburdened himself of the 84-year-old hasbeen with an alacrity that surprised no one except, possibly, Bongiorno himself. During his long career, Bongiorno presented a host of quiz shows and not much else, though he'd recently acquired a pinch of semi-yoof credibility by making himself ridiculous in cellphone ads with Fiorello, Italy's current favourite showman (and a man of far greater talent than Bongiorno). He'd also reacted to his dismissal from commercial and state tv with a touching sense of hurt, which made him more likeable than he had often been on his own shows. A few months ago, he'd been picked up and dusted down by Sky, and was working on a revival of his most successful show, an Italian clone of the $64,000 Question. We'll never know how successful this might have been, but, as has been said about so many people, his unexpected death was probably a wise career move.

Umberto Eco wrote a famous essay about him, many years ago, entitled The Phenomonology of Mike Bongiorno, which still pretty much sums up the man's appeal. Eco said:

Idolized by millions of people, this man owes his success to the fact that from every act, from every word of the persona that he presents to the telecameras there emanates an absolute mediocrity along with [...] an immediate and spontaneous allure, which is explicable by the fact that he betrays no sign of theatrical artifice or pretence. He seems to be selling himself as precisely what he is, and what he is cannot create in a spectator, even the most ignorant, any sense of inferiority. Indeed, the spectator sees his own limitations glorified and supported by national authority.

Today, three days after Bongiorno's sudden death, national authority, in the form of Bongiorno's ex-boss, has decreed that the quizmaster receive a state funeral, naturally broadcast live on RAI 1. These ceremonies are normally saved for soldiers or the victims of national tragedies of some osrt, but it's not the first time a popular entertainer has been honoured in this way. Some years ago, Alberto Sordi, one of Italy's most important film actors, also had a state funeral, though I don't remember it being televised. Mario Luzi, the poet, was another. I have nothing against Bongiorno, who struck me as being an ingenuous, rather vulnerable man, particularly in recent years, more easily wounded than was sensible. But I can't help feeling that we're getting something wrong when an entertainer like Bongiorno is treated with this much respect. Because what we are celebrating is not, as it was with Sordi, a career, conflictual, ambiguous, self-congratulatory and self-accusing in equal measure, a body of work that interrogates the nature of what it means to be Italian and produces no easy answers. What Bongiorno did was contribute to the commodification of Italian culture, the wholesale adoption of easy answers, to such an extent that he became its representative, as Simon Cowell might be said to be ours, where we embody the notion of commodity as 'talent' rather than its reverse.

I wonder what the national authority will do when Umberto Eco dies.