Many protests and no arrests on the "free" TV of 1980. Watch this video from forty-five years ago: apart from its "vintage" quality, it will make you smile — and then I'll tell you a few things about it.
What you just watched — "For Money or for TV?" — was part of the first national production of what were called the "free" television stations. Berlusconi always liked to boast that he was the first to broadcast more or less simultaneously across all of Italy. But he was only the second to do it, and he did it in a conventional way — anything but free or creative.
In 1980, we were the first to send the now-legendary cassettes to a circuit of 136 local TV stations scattered across the country. Those cassettes — in the terrible but glorious three-quarter inch format — aired on all those stations on the same evening, a few minutes apart at most.
But why am I telling you all these details from prehistoric television? What does this have to do with freedom?
Let's go back almost half a century. In this country, in those years, television meant the RAI and nothing else. When these small local stations were born — immediately and optimistically nicknamed "free" TV — all of us in the industry were overjoyed, because we believed we could finally break free from the deadening tedium of state television programming and experiment with new forms of communication.
It was a wonderful moment — the TV equivalent of '68. There was creativity, innovation, a hunger to make things and entertain audiences. Even though sponsors were only local in those days, I somehow managed to land a national sponsor who wanted exactly that: a national programme. The sponsor was Dixan, the detergent brand, and the show was called "Tombolissima" because inside the boxes of washing powder there was a bingo card that let you play along with the TV.
To liven up the studio show with filmed inserts, I went around the country with my brother Bruno and other pioneers of the TV of that era — among whom I particularly want to remember Artuso father and son, and Massimo and Stefano Bosco.
I had total freedom, and since the times were not as grim as these, I convinced Italians to speak up, to protest against everything and everyone, to shout — even against those who stay silent, who don't act, "against the silence of those in charge." It was an absolute success.
There was no woman, no mother, no Christian who tried to stop us. But the most significant memory of that period concerns Television with a capital T. Think of this: it was the very first time we had cameras — JVC 1900s — that could actually leave the studio. The cameras alone couldn't record and had to be connected by cables to video recorders that weighed twenty kilos each. A crew rigged out like this was called a "camel crew." It was quite a sight to watch the cameramen and their assistants running around tethered to this cable umbilical cord, always looking as though they were about to trip and fall flat on their faces.
I had three cameras following me around — six people in all, plus the production team, the editorial staff, the assistants. There were twelve of us, all wearing a simple T-shirt with just one word in enormous letters: TV. Because we were "TV." Nobody asked us the standard question that's thrown at every crew today: "What channel are you from?" Because there were no external crews from local stations yet. We were the first. We weren't a "small" RAI in the hands of political parties — we were TV itself, the real thing, the Supreme Entity on the side of the people. And together, on the street, believe me, with those ridiculous T-shirts we made quite an impression. We gave everyone a genuine sense of freedom. We were, I say again, "TV" — the good kind, the true kind, the kind without owners — and we could protest against the most absurd things: railway loneliness and overbearing pigeons, inhuman newspapers and indifferent clocks. There was a constant running through all of it: a great urge to come together and say basta — a right that somebody, today, tries to erase a little more with every passing day.
You all know how it ended. My Dixan sponsor got swallowed up by Berlusconi, who took "Tombolissima" and turned it into "Premiatissima." And after my sponsor, bit by bit, the then-"Dottore" bought up the local stations that became Canale 5, Rete4, Italia 1, and so on and so on.
Today there are very few channels you can watch without feeling sick. But even in the best cases, you sometimes sense that there is an invisible line you can no longer cross. Journalists who haven't been bought are under constant surveillance, and that breezy fragrance — that exhilarating feeling of freedom — is gone. We have to write with lawyers sitting next to us.
Alessandro Ippolito