Ravi is sitting on the sofa with a cup of coffee in his hand as I click on the television from my armchair. It’s a typical New York Sunday morning and we’re lazy. Ravi, who hails from Boston, MA via Lexington, KY via Madras, India, and therefore has a particular disdain for New York, sips his coffee quietly, counting down the hours until his Bolt Bus departure back to New England. I quickly surf through a variety of HD channels where political pundits regurgitate shallow perspectives from within their media echo chamber. They wear suits and ties and are middle-aged and drone on about the usual problems while offering the usual solutions. Their high-timbre voices blend into one long, tremulant whine. But at least the picture quality is phenomenal and crisp and very 2010.
Then, I firmly press 5-5-4 and the television stalls. The picture flickers, settling into a series of dull and grainy images. In an instant, we’ve gone from immaculate production quality to an age of broadcasting prehistory. Ravi raises his somber eyes. A blurred pixel bounces across the screen. I explain to him that it’s meant to be a ball. Suddenly, it dawns on him. We’re watching Serie A soccer and the channel is RAI International.
If it’s true that television is the barometer of a society’s cultural standing, then documentaries like Videocracy and Il Corpo delle Donne (Women’s Bodies) have already measured Italy’s diagnostics. But when one watches RAI International and the empty-calorie programming it slingshots across the Atlantic and into the New York cablesphere, one wonders whatever happened to plain, good old-fashioned quality Italian television. You know, the kind that’s just interesting, well-made and fun to watch and not the crap for which I’m paying an additional $10 a month to Time Warner Cable. (Question: did that kind of Italian TV even ever exist?)
But, more than anything, one wonders what ever happened to the sense of pride in good taste Italians are well-renowned for having all around the world- La Bella Figura, as Beppe Severgnini famously wrote in his book by the same name. Judging by RAI International, all Italians have to offer nowadays is La Brutta Figura- ludicrous game shows where everyone shouts, mundane talk shows where everyone shouts, pathetic pageants where everyone shouts, and horrendously scripted serials where protagonists whisper at each other (to convey seriousness) only to end up shouting.
I shudder to think that people in Australia and Madagascar and Nepal could be watching a moronic game show with an overly tan host flailing his arms about in a spasm of gratuitous exuberance; or that international viewers would be tuning in to the mind-numbing dreariness of the plots in mystery serials such as Donna Detective (Detective Woman) or Ho Sposato uno Sbirro 2 (I Married a Cop 2) and concluding that this is what Italians are really like. Or, better yet: is this what Italians are really like?
And then there is the midday programming. The interminable hours of black-and-white variety shows from nonna’s yesteryear with Mina and Domenico Modugno and Toto’; the flaccid, intermission graphics depicting pizzas and Alberto Sordi eating spaghetti and fleeting images of Ferraris (because, surely, every Italian must have one!) Has Italy not produced any entertainers since 1960? Is this the image of Italy RAI International wants promoted abroad to complement Berlusconi’s chauvinism, Naples’ towers of trash, and the obnoxious club promoter Fabrizio who bounced me twice from Pink Elephant? Is this Italian professionalism at its best?
“It’s hard to know what professionalism means in Italy,” says Ravi stirring on the sofa as if a mosquito suddenly bit him. “If being professional means ogling the inappropriately dressed woman hosting a show she knows nothing about and was only hired for because she “serviced” the producer, then I would say RAI is the most professional channel I have ever seen.”
But, let’s get back to soccer.
It’s a bit telling that US network Fox Soccer Channel’s picture quality of Serie A is better than RAI International’s. It’s like the reverse of those shirts sold in Little Italy that boast that “Italians do it better.” With RAI International, Italians definitely do it worse.
Lascia un commento