Andrew Simpson: Italian TV

Showing posts with label Italian TV. Show all posts

Wednesday, 8 February 2023

One hundred years of one house in Chorlton ... part 145 ….. music festivals from afar

The continuing story of the house Joe and Mary Ann Scott lived in for over 50 years and the families that have lived here since.*

I have no idea if Joe and Mary Ann sat down to the Eurovision Song Contest. I know the younger me didn’t.

In my 20s and 30s I was scornful, and it was only as I entered my retirement years that I occasionally let it take over the telly.

Not so friends who embrace the night like a drowning man embraces a log of wood. Their houses are decked out in the national flags of the competitors, heaps of food and wine are laid on and the night unrolls with a mix of humour, unbelief and closes with a bout of recrimination and name calling.

We on the other hand will be preparing another evening with Sanremo, that festival of live music spread out over five days.

It began in 1951 making this the 73rd annual musical bash.

My Wikipedia tells me that "The Sanremo Music Festival, officially the Italian Song Festival (Italian: Festival della canzone italiana) and commonly known as just Festival di Sanremo (Italian: [sanˈrɛːmo]), is the most popular Italian song contest and awards ceremony, held annually in the city of Sanremo, Liguria.

It is the longest-running annual TV music competition in the world on a national level (making it one of the world's longest-running television programmes) and it is also the basis and inspiration for the annual Eurovision Song Contest.

Unlike other awards in Italy, the Sanremo Music Festival is a competition for new songs, not an award to previous successes” **

Tonight is the second evening of the festival, but already for weeks Italian TV has been full of it with the afternoon show on RAI dominated by interviews with the Italian TV and radio presenter, Amadeus who will front the Festival and a heap of past contestants accompanied by clips of their performances and admiring comments from fans.

Rosa is a great fan and each year battles to stay wake to see the end. Tina is less bothered and after a decent interval I will slide next door and catch an old movie pretty much from the time Joe and Mary Ann were reaching middle age.

I suspect that if they were still around they would join me, but maybe not. Despite talking to loads of people who remember them I am not much further finding out what they were like.

I know they embraced change, appearing not to have used the old washing copper in the cellar, and may not even have installed a range in the kitchen, going instead for a gas cooker which back in 1915 were being marketed by Manchester City Council at very attractive prices.

They also had a telephone by the early 1920s and a television by the mid 1950s.

So they may have nodded with approval at the dish which allows us to watch Italian TV, and which presents us with that familiar problem from terrestrial television and the media channels that despite a plethora of channels there isn’t much we want to choose.

Still for the next week there is the festival., preceded by various Italian news programmes, which are not do different from the BBC.

Location; Beech Road

Pictures; snapshots from RAI 2023

*The Story of a House, http://chorltonhistory.blogspot.co.uk/search/label/The%20story%20of%20a%20house

**Sanremo Music Festival, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sanremo_Music_Festival

Wednesday, 17 November 2021

One hundred years of one house in Chorlton ... part 126 .... the Italian bit ......going digital …… and travelling from the age of the wireless

The continuing story of the house Joe and Mary Ann Scott lived in for over 50 years and the families that have lived here since.*

The telly, 1950s

I often wonder what Joe and Mary Ann would have made of the digital age.

After all they were both born in the closing decades of the 19^th century and reached maturity as cinema was still in its infancy, and telephones, the wireless and cameras were yet to become household objects.

That said by the time they had reached middle age they had a telephone, dispensed with the traditional cooking range and had joined the growing band of people watching television in their own home.

Added to which by the 1920s, Joe was building houses with electricity which he proudly advertised across Chorlton-cum-Hardy.

So, I think they may well have welcomed computers, smart phones, and microwaves into their home as necessary items.

Topical Italian TV, 2021

Likewise I think they would not have batted an eyelid at the arrival of Italian television in to what was their front room.

It will have been over seventeen years ago that we went digital with a satellite dish, and now we have upgraded so that we can watch Italian TV stations which is not an affectation, but a practical necessity given that half the family is Italian.

If it's Sunday its Italian dancing, 2016

Of course, there is a down side, which is the nonstop cascade of entertainment shows from one provider on a Sunday, which roll on from midday into the night, and despite having different names and offering slightly different content are basically just seamless happy TV.

All a little different from the two televisions channels of the 1950s, when programmes finished before midnight, were in black and white and on a Sunday were interrupted by a close down in the late afternoon for a few hours.

The choice of TV, 1964

That time is as remote and incomprehensible to any one born after 1980 as would the cinema be to someone from the Middle Ages.

But I am confident that Joe and Mary Ann would happily sit watching past episode of their favourite soap on their mobile phone, while debating which take away to order up and finishing having booked online their coach holiday to Skegness.

So that I think allows me to be confident that our new Italian TV shows fit well with the history of the house.

Well …. perhaps.