The Archipelago by John Foot

Author:John Foot
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Neo-Television

There were three key courses in the Berlusconian TV diet. One was made up of soap operas (Dallas was his most obvious early success) and films bought as a package. The second key feature was football and chat about football. Thirdly, there were game shows with intense levels of in-programme advertising. News was absent (it would later become central) and there was no attempt at any kind of high culture or educational programming. Berlusconi’s TV was garish, loud, fast-paced and exciting. It was in your face. It sold you things, openly.

There can be little doubt that many Italians – almost certainly the majority of those who watched a lot of television in the 1970s and 1980s and 1990s – enjoyed the material being pumped out by Berlusconi’s channels. It was a key part of their lives. When Italians were given a chance to break up Berlusconi’s media empire through a referendum in 1995, they refused to do so by a big majority – 15.3 million to 11.6 million. Berlusconi did not invent consumerism, or individualism. He did, however, play a key role in shaping the ways these trends took hold in Italian society and culture. By 1999 Italians were watching around four hours of TV every day.42

Before Berlusconi, Italian television was funded through two means – firstly, a licence payable by all TV owners called ‘il canone’. This was one of the most evaded ‘taxes’ in the Italian Republic, but it still brought in considerable funds. Secondly, state television also had advertising, although this was heavily controlled in the early period of the medium’s history. Berlusconi’s stations, however, did not have a licence fee. He relied entirely on advertising.

The cultural critic Umberto Eco invented the term ‘neo-television’ in 1983.43 As ever, the work of Eco was extremely influential. He drew a contrast between what he called ‘Paleo-Television’, which he said ‘was produced in Rome or Milan for everyone. It spoke of the appointment of ministers and it saw to it that the public learnt about harmless things, even if that meant telling it [the public] lies.’44 In the 1970s and 1980s this all changed. As Eco argued, ‘With the multiplication of channels, privatisation and the arrival of new electronic devilries, we are now living in the era of Neo-Television.’45 But what was ‘neo-television’? For Eco, ‘whereas Paleo-TV talked about the external world, or pretended to, Neo-TV talks about itself and about the contact that it established with its own public’.46Until the arrival of private television, as we have seen, the RAI was a state monopoly.

The shift of audience in the 1970s was stunning. From a monopoly, with all the audience, the RAI managed to lose half its viewers by 1982. This dramatic transformation obviously affected advertising revenues. Only a third of this revenue was going to the RAI by 1983. Most Italians clearly didn’t want to watch the state channels any more (now that they had a choice, at last) and advertisers didn’t think that the advertising on RAI channels would sell their products.

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