Italy's Showbiz Politics

...That prime time Italian television is rather bizarre, not only to the foreign eye, and that women are predominantly portrayed as frilly, infantile sex toys, is largely undisputed, even in Italy," Nina Rothenberg—who teaches sociology at the American University of Rome and is carrying out research on the Italian media—wrote recently in the English language newspaper Italian Weekly...

...There was a golden moment when the two great broadcasters squandered their money...

...For decades, in fact, until the collapse in the early 1990s of the finely balanced postwar political configuration, the news divisions of the three state-run Radiotelevisioni Italiana (RAI) networks were formally allotted through a spoils system to the three main political parties...

...It depicts the life, or lives, of Chuck Barris, the inventor of The Dating Gaine, The Newlywed Game and The Gong Show—the trashy forerunners of all of today's reality quiz shows— who also claimed to play a secret role as a hit man for the CIA...

...Criticism of Italian TV has frequently come from abroad, but embarrassed and frustrated Italians, too, regularly bemoan a populist videocracy aimed at a sub-zero common denominator...

...Muccino himself described the film as a comment on a contemporary Italy "where only appearances count, where you exist if you manage to have a minute of notoriety on TV...

...His aggressive strategy was to woo viewers away from RAI with a diet of crowdpleasing sitcoms, soap operas, quiz and variety shows, and movies...

...Last month they included middle-aged rockers Peter Gabriel and Rod Stewart, and country crossover Shania Twain...

...For many, watching the Festival is like eating comfort food or snuggling up with a security blanket, à la Linus in the Peanuts comic strip...

...For the teenaged daughter, Valentina, success means nothing less than becoming a quiz show velina...

...The richest man in the country, Berlusconi has business, media, sports, and other interests that permeate Italy in an unprecedented fashion...

...The ensuing ratings war changed the face of Italian television, since RAI countered by jazzing up (and dumbing down) its programming...

...But it isn't rotting garbage or a dead cat that has made them want to vomit...

...A large number of them, predictably, defended Italian TV and pointed out, justly, that a lot of British and American commercial programming is also not much to write home about...

...This helped him sweep into office at the head of a CenterRight coalition in 2001, and it now enables him to beam his message to the masses...

...By now there is scant difference between most RAI programming and that found on the Mediaset channels...

...Yet, he noted, television has become so pervasive that the family TV set is sometimes dubbed the focolare domestico—the domestic hearth...

...If you watch football matches, or television, try to buy a house or a book or newspaper, rent a video or simply shop in a supermarket, the chances are you're somehow filling [his] coffers (last estimated to be worth $14 billion...

...Television now nearing 70, who first hosted San Remo in 1968...

...My response is this," he wrote in a letter published in La Repubblica...

...feasting on its own tasteless entrails...

...These forces have combined to create a status quo, allowing cheaply produced quizzes, talk shows and "reality shows" to proliferate...

...She doesn't know how to sing, but she knows how to smile at the right people and to wiggle her halfdressed body...

...Fixated on this goal, she is prepared to do anything to achieve it...

...And he triumphed through a piece of tactical genius...

...Sets run all day long in many Italian living rooms, often with the sound turned off and the images flowing like framed animations...

...The tyranny of the ratings is ever stronger," political scientist Giovanni Sartori told the magazine Venerd...

...So identified is he with mass appeal "national-populist" entertainment that his marriage to the opera singer Katia Ricciarelli in the 1980s was portrayed in the media as a shocking clash of cultures...

...exclaims the wife, as she and her husband hold their noses and frantically search the house...

...On a recent trip to the states, just as here in Italy, I fruitlessly zapped through dozens of channels looking for something to watch...

...The enigma," Jones wrote, "is how Italy—home to the most creative people on earth—ever produced such a leviathan...

...February, she explains, is the run up to the annual San Remo Festival of Italian Song, a garish, sentimental, aggressively populist extravaganza of syrupy music and contrived stage patter that, at least on television, is treated as a national event...

...I will go on your show when you are no longer an employee of the Prime Minister...

...In particular, Berlusconi's power over Italy's mass media is unique in a Western democracy...

...Italian programming, he declared, was "a self-reflexive hall of mirrors...

...To still others, represented by the woman in the cartoon...

...Italian TV has long been deplored—and derided—for its vapid variety shows, its politicized shouting matches, its sexist displays, and the blatantly partisan editorial slant of its news reports...

...Certain anchormen became notorious for promoting their boss, Silvio Berlusconi, the billionaire media mogul turned politician who headed the conservative opposition through the latter part of the 1990s and today is Italy's prime minister...

...What separates Italian TV from its British and American commercial counterparts, he added, is the historic "bear-hug" here between TV and politics, which has become more evident, more accentuated and, to many, more sinister since Berlusconi became prime minister...

...In addition, Berlusconi's Publitalia PR company is said to be responsible for selling 60 per cent of the advertising on Italian TV...

...It smells like something died...

...Hailed by French newspapers as a denunciation of the "cultural genocide" perpetrated by the degeneration of television, Ginger and Fred sparked one of the periodic public debates about the state of Italian broadcasting and culture that erupt like clockwork every couple of years...

...Last year, the critic Natalia Aspesi described them as governed by a "San Remian and Baudian law that beauties cannot have a brain and thus are unable to be themselves, to express a thought, to say anything that is spontaneous and not learned from a rickety script...

...Young, sometimes unknown, singers as well as established artists known as the "bigs" (i big) go on stage, one by one, to perform newly written, generally blandly melodic, songs that are judged by both popular and professional juries...

...Millions of Italians tune in to the fiveday long song competition that this year marked its 53rd edition...

...These proliferated quickly, reaching more than 400 by 1978...

...The Jones article actually was published to coincide with the launching in Britain of his new book, The Dark Heart of Italy, a less than flattering account of everyday life in Italy under Berlusconi...

...Recent incidents have demonstrated how the Prime Minister unhesitatingly uses his near-monopoly against opponents...

...RAI-1 was controlled by the Christian Democrats and reflected their conservative bent, RAI-2 was the domain of the Socialists, andRAI-3 was where the Communists held forth...

...Each evening's show stretches out over several hours...

...Italian state television formally lost its monopoly in the 1970s, when local commercial channels were permitted to form...

...Last year the wife of Italy's President Carlo A. Ciampi made headlines by denouncing Italian TV as deficiente—half-witted...

...As Jones put it, the real complaint "isn't that [Berlusconi has] changed the rules of the game by conflating politics and television...

...But Berlusconi is one of President George W. Bush's key allies in the campaign against Iraq...

...In executing it, he wooed away some of RAI's most popular stars with hefty paychecks and publicity...

...Long before Berlusconi's direct entry into politics in the early 1990s, however, critics branded him the evil genius behind the banalization of Italian TV and consequent conditioning of the viewership...

...In February we enter the San Remo zone," the wife reminds her husband, "and the TV begins to stink like a cadaver...

...A new movie by Italian director Gabriele Muccino, Ricordati di me ("Remember Me") examines their allure...

...It's February— it's the television...

...Ruth Ellen Gruber is a regular NL contributor...

...The worsening of TV is a slow process that began at the beginning of the 1980s, when the competition between RAI and Fininvest was born," says Milan sociologist Maino Livolsi...

...Restaurants, too, frequently and annoyingly, keep a TV set running...

...Others simply love to hate it for its high quotient of kitsch...

...The difference is the heaviness of direct political intervention...

...Married to an Italian woman, Jones has lived in Parma for the past four years...

...The one he selected was slick, staunchly anti-intellectual and saturated by a flood of flashy, American-style ads...

...They are sort of animated props playing the role of objects of desire, locker-room pinups come to life...

...Jones, of course, is not alone—and not new—in his indictment...

...Collectively they form a televisual category all their own—not quite stars or even starlets, not quite fashion models, but not really chorus girls, either...

...As for leaving the television on as part of the domestic background, the journalist Paola Liberace cited a British survey that found 3 3 percent of the English watch the tube during dinner, and 46 per cent turn it on first thing when they get home from work...

...His Fininvest holding group, through a conglomerate called Mediaset, owns the three main commercial TV channels, and his government exercises control over the state's three RAI channels...

...A popular satirical show on RAI was also disciplined after it devoted a program to him...

...San Remo epitomizes the glitzy excess and almost defiant vulgarity that characterizes much Italian broadcast programming...

...Since January, Italy has been in the full flush of a new round of attacks and recriminations...

...The film focuses on a middle-class family obsessed, unhappily, with making it...

...Her newest book is Virtually Jewish: Reinventing Jewish Culture in Europe...

...His article provoked a rash of responses...

...Starting in 1979, Berlusconi was able to consolidate them into real national broadcast networks...

...It is this girl, arrogant, unscrupulous, obsessed by her image in the mirror, who is the emblematic figure in the film," wrote Claudia Morgoglione in the Rome daily La Repubblica...

...At San Remo, Baudo is invariably flanked by what have become obligatory accessories—a matched set of decorative young women called vallettes...

...Known generically as soubrettes, they are also called veline ("little news flashes") or letterine ("little letters"), depending on the show...

...Not since Mussolini, they say, has so much power been centered in one person...

...Nick Cohen, another Englishman writing in the Observer, compared Berlusconi's use of the media to something out of George Orwell's 1984, then added: "The combination of the moronic hedonism of his channels and the patronage a solid majority in the Italian parliament delivers suggests an Italy where The Truman Show meets The Godfather" I would note that the new film Confessions of a Dangerous Mind provides another level of reference...

...During his Sunday variety show on one of Berlusconi's channels, the popular host Maurizio Costanza challenged Tobias Jones to appear on his program...

...The newscasts on commercial television were no less partisan...

...Similar young women are standard features of numerous other variety, quiz and even talk shows, where they perform in various states of undress...

...Much of this will sound familiar to Americans...

...His characters, he said, "are victims of their models, hammered home every day by television...

...Together, these six channels account for some 95 per cent of the nation's TV audience—a captive saturation market for political, social and cultural communication...

...Swooping cameras, dizzying lights, flashing colors, and wild applause filled the screen in between lots of commercials...

...Jones assented, with one big condition...

...The imperative is to get as big an audience as possible...

...But then the money dried up...

...it's simply that he's won the old game so very, very convincingly...

...Indeed, many of the quiz or "reality shows" currently clogging the Italian air waves, like Big Brother and Who Wants to Be A Millionaire, are British or American imports...

...This February, RAI directors barred live coverage of the mass antiwar demonstrations in Rome and other cities, prompting a protest by a number of reporters...

...Their job, basically, is to look pretty, smile, titillate a little, wear flashy clothes, be complimented on their looks, and cheerfully acquiesce to innuendo...

...Last year, three people on RAI were yanked off the air after criticizing Berlusconi, who lashed out at them for "making criminal use of public television...

...Throughout the greedy '80s, when Italian commercial broadcasting was bound by few regulations, Berlusconi was free to create his TV empire in whatever image he chose...

...Jones, though, in a public reply to his critics, said he had received hundreds of e-mails from ordinary Italians thanking him for expressing their own thoughts...

...The MC was the veteran showman Pippo Baudo, an unctuous Mr...

...Of course," the wife finally realizes...

...The Italians," he concluded, "are too intelligent to be ensnared by the political propaganda broadcast every evening on their TV screens...

...The movie depicts a nightmare world of media hype, false dreams and debased ideals...

...it doesn't matter if it is composed of 10 million illiterates...

...The opposition here has been hammering it home every day, with some going so far as to compare Berlusconi with the Fascist dictator Benito Mussolini...

...As long ago as 1985, Federico Fellini skewered TV trash culture in his movie Ginger and Fred, abittersweet satire starring Marcello Mastroianni and Giulietta Masina as a has-been dance couple who get a chance to resurrect their career on a garish TV variety show hosted by a clone of Pippo Baudo...

...The Italian acts are spiced up with appearances by international stars...

...The lack of investment has necessitated a push for bigger audiences, bigger advertising income, and smaller production costs...

...It's impossible to move without inadvertently coming up against his influence," writes Jones in his book...

...He gleefully catalogued a nauseating mix of cheesy variety shows, talk shows, game shows, and commercials that made him feel as if his brain was "turning to custard...

...Moreover, the few programs of real quality are mostly broadcast at off hours—very late at night or very early in the morning...

...He turned the tables on the old political guard by deciding to colonize politics through television, rather than vice versa...

...It was unmistakably the Berlusconian model of mass culture, for instance, that Fellini targeted with Ginger and Fred...

...As a Festival Web site put it, the "magic formula" in choosing vallettes is "one blonde and one brunette...

...This time it was touched off by an article in the Financial Times provocatively called "My Italian TV Hell," by a young British journalist, Tobias Jones...