Punctuation (re)marks

If The Stories of Inspector Morse, by Colin Dexter or Ruth Rendell, were true (let's forget the Psychograph by mass killer Dennis Nilsen for the nonce), then the crime statistics of Oxford and Kingsmarkham must surely throw the global ones of the British Isles out of kilter.

Seeing that series like the aforementioned are only produced out of the PBS hat for cosy winter evenings, we have to zap from one station to another during news bulletins, telenovelas or discussions so as to get our fix of whodunits.

Basically, this obtains because any two given bulletins are so different from one another that some things which are mentioned in one are either totally ignored or presented as diametrically opposite in another.

Seeing that I am precluded from applying to form part of the song-and-dance brigade (as one disc jockey put it succinctly, intom l-anzjani tiehdu gost tisimghu diski tas-snin Sittinijiet) I had to apply for a correspondence course in telenovela writing instead to be able to tackle the niceties of it all; I really couldn't decided whether - inner (the programme for women aged 40+ on Net Television) was a misspelling of Zimmer (as in frame) or Englese for someone who lays it on thick, so I gave it a miss.

This discipline requires being able to read between the lines, and coming to one's own confusions rather than conclusions. For instance, this week there was the tiny whisper about experts saying this, that and the other about the possible impact of Scammel trucks passing to and from a world heritage site area.

Coupled with the fact that a quarry in the same general location could, to all intents and purposes, probably still be worked, it does not take a genius to compare what happened to the walls of Jericho, which were less precariously balanced than the stone structures of our forebears, when they were beset by vibrations.

Think of what 'short-term' means in political parlance - not only when it is applied to such dire phrases as "period of austerity", and you have UNESCO, NATO, EU, and the rest of the alphabet breathing down your neck.

Ladies and gentlemen, I give you tiny slivers of racism, from the sublime to the ridiculous, to compare and contrast with other scenarios totally unconnected with Malta. There was once a final of the Miss Talent Show in America, mentioned in a previous column, where the finalists were a brilliant and multi-talented, coloured, extremely thin prognathous soprano, and your typical cheerleader with flowing blonde locks, who played the piano extremely well, but that's about it. And, sure enough, it was the latter who bagged the prize, which was, you will recall, about aptitude not looks.

On a lesser scale, we recently saw how the eye-catching dark-skinned chap with bleached hair and the preppie boy made it to the finals of Beato Fra Le Donne, and, again, the Caucasian won. All this, of course, could have been by accident and not design.

For, after all, it was a group of African mothers who wrote to the administration of the Big Brother Africa Show, asking to have it banned. This 'real TV gone crazy' episodic saga was, they said, having a corrupting influence on their minors.

I take it, then, that inside the home, it was the kids themselves who decided what was going to be watched.

All this reminds me of the quotation about how education has taught people how to read, but not taught them to discern between pulp and what is worth reading.

There was a time when [trans] portable television sets came complete with a V.H.F. (otherwise known as F.M.) radio receiver (for when there was nothing worth watching?); and a time when televisions were literally items of furniture, to be shut away inside cabinets and all but forgotten when they were not in use.

The September 1956 British edition of the Reader's Digest carried an advertorial television and radio review that made much of what was then an innovation, in preparation for the Twenty-Third National Radio Exhibition (entrance fee three shillings).

But on a more mundane level, the way news coverage of what has now passed into the annals of history as The Floriana Rape Case (capitals courtesy of a 'certain section of the Press') was presented leave much to be desired. How would anyone innocent until proven guilty but not of North African nationality, have been treated? Would television cameras have been practically shoved against his cheek? And I still hadn't mentioned the hypothetical court case Rodney King vs. O.J. Simpson until now.

On much the same lines, Radio 101 also informed us, with a straight face (?) that the relics of Saint Thérèse of Lisieux were taken sahansitra to the Corradino Correctional Facilities.

That having been said, every so often one catches a glimmer of hope emanating from the combined antennae of PBS (the station of the nation), One Television (the station of the people) and Net Television (the station of everyone else). These three stations (why not the others too?) have once more pledged their support for the Kerygma volleyball marathon will be giving us live coverage of the event. This is one thing that cannot be interpreted totally differently from one station to the next... at least when the same match is being aired simultaneously on two stations.

There were other awards handed out this week; namely for performance in sports, as broadcast by Net Television last Sunday night. Oh to win a mint humbug moulded into the form of a boomerang. Better still, to win ditto in the shape of one fourth of the eight-pointed cross of the same surface area... but each to his own.

Incidentally, the first lesson in the Teach Yourself Telenovela Scripting (it is not protected by copyright, so I can share it), to be expounded on later, is not, as one would think, setting the scene. Entitled "choosing your characters", it lists a number of possibilities (read stock characters), and suggests possible juxtapositions for them.

So we have the Lady who is a Whore at heart; the closet homosexual who may, or may not, come out; the bastard who appears from nowhere; the expatriate who returns with all the foibles attributed to his adoptive country; the con man; the police agent; the nerd; the nouveau riche family; the politician, preferably corrupt, with or without a bit on the side; the person with a handicap that may not be genuine; the underworld thug; the woman who wears the trousers; the maid with ideas above her station; the foreigner... and so on, for three solid A4 single-space pages.

This means, practically, that any script may go on forever, given the appropriate permutations (and in Malta, often does); and one may write parts for all one's kith and kin. And if you happen to have an outfit - and a person to wear it - waiting in the wings, you can include both in a sub-plot, even if it turns out to be a dream sequence (about which, more, later).