Andrew Simpson: Italian Television

Showing posts with label Italian Television. Show all posts

Thursday, 16 March 2023

Travelling Italian history with La sposa

Now I am the first to admit that television dramas are not the most reliable way to learn history, for all the obvious reasons.

But done well they can offer up something, and with the passage of time become historical pieces, showing us how thought about a period in the past.

And so, with that in mind on Sunday night we tuned into the three part drama La sposa [The Bride] which went out on Rai 1.

Sunday is not the most promising time to watch Italian TV, given that a big chunk of the afternoon and early evening is dominated by a series of light entertainment shows which seamlessly run into each other.

But La sposa promised to be something different.

It was according to the pre publicity, “a touching story about the personal and family growth of a woman and a poignant love story, which ….. is a series set in the past, but which speaks to the present. Faces topical issues like the female emancipation, the gender equality, and compliance with socio-cultural differences. A modern tale, whose protagonist is a courageous and strong female figure, a great example of tenacity and social redemption.

Italy, late 1960s. These were years of great changes and transformations, from customs to politics. But in some areas of the country archaic practices such as weddings by proxy, in which young Southern women are given in brides to Northern men, mostly farmers. This is it premise that triggers the story of La Sposa…”*

The practice of easing a family’s poverty or fulfilling a debt by selling off a child rolls down the centuries, but La sposa also highlights the economic disparities between the south and the north of Italy and the prejudice of some northern Italians to those from the south and is reflected in the Lega Nord [Northern League], which is a political party with an anti-south stance.

And closer to home there is Thomas Hardy’s The Mayor Of Casterbridge written in 1886 which opens with the awful auction of Susan Henchard and her baby daughter at a country fair by her drunken husband.

So there is plenty of precedence for the story of La sposa.

The opening episode mixed the hard life in Calabria, and the strong family ties with the equally hard life in the north for the young woman who having exacted a pre-nuptial agreement that her future husband would “undertake to pay the debt, pay the rent, the studies of her brother Giuseppe and also organize the marriage of younger sister” is betrayed.

Well history it may be but it is also a drama with plenty of twists many of which reflect the Italy of the 1960s.

Location; Italy in the 1960s

Picture; Naples 2018, from the collection of Saul Simpson

* La sposa, Tonight on Rai 1 the First Episode of the New Fiction with Serena Rossi, Italy 24 News, Sunday January23rd, 2022

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

Friday, 3 December 2021

One hundred years of one house in Chorlton ... part 127 ….. six hours with Amadeus, a selection of Italian TV and the odd quiz show

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.*

Dancing the Sunday away, 2019

Now, I have no idea what Joe and Mary Ann would have made of the seamless six hours of entertainment which goes out every Sunday on Italy’s television channel Rai 1.

The Italian side of the family still refer to it as Rai Uno, which was its name from when it began in 1954 until 2010.

And I have to say the first time I watched this nonstop onslaught of fun, music, chat show and quiz I was bemused. More so because each slides effortlessly into the next with little in the way of interruption.

Even now I still half expect the broadcast to be broken by something else, but no it just rolls on, taking up a huge chunk of the afternoon and evening.

Watching Domenica in, 2019

It is simply called “Domenica in” which not unsurprisingly translates as Sunday in.

My Wikipedia tells me that it was launched in 1976, “and was originally planned to offer to the Italian audience, affected in those years by a profound austerity, an alternative to the typical Sunday afternoon trips and outings.

It has been the first Italian program to go well beyond the standard duration of 2 hours and to have a very long running, about six hours from 2:00 p.m.

A program which is different in its structure from one edition to another, it consists of different segments reserved for entertainment, interviews, sport, games, journalism”**

Amadeus, 2014

All of which might well have got Joe and Mary Ann a bit confused if they still lived here but is just another chapter in the story of the house, because we have replaced our satellite dish with a new one which points south and allows us to watch Italian TV in real time.

And so, as an alternative to the usual offerings of British quiz shows, we can watch the presenter as Amadeus present a nightly series of programmes, where a contestants pit themselves against celebrities and each other, followed by another show which involves some of the same contestants in a slightly different game of questions and answers.

Amadeus is actually, Amedeo Umberto Rita Sebastiani, who was born in 1962, started as DJ and along with quiz shows and Domenica in, has presented a serious of talent contests and singing festivals.

With Rai 1

Of course I am well aware that other houses can boast similar stories of how the digital revolution has changed the patterns of entertainment, but then this is the story of our house which was built in 1915, and has been occupied by four households of which we are the latest.

Joe and Mary Ann were here for 59 years, and we have occupied the place for 45. They introduced electricity, dispensed with the old kitchen range and were I think one of the first to have a telly, so we are just following their lead.