Interior designers

TOWARDS the end of a year, and at the beginning of the following one, so-called clairvoyants ostensibly predict what will occur to people and places; it always amazes me that they fail to predict certain momentous events (see below); but they always have a ready excuse.

One of the aforementioned seers, lording it from his seat on a foreign television station, duly provided us with a list of celebrity couples who will split up in the next year.

Locally, we had a watered-down version of the same thing; with the aborted expression jew hafna hmeri... being used to describe a certain prayer, and ambiguous waffle which could mean anything, but actually meant nothing.

MANY people would know that the release of Arnold Schwarzenegger's Collateral Damage was postponed for four months, because it featured the terrorist bombing in front of a Los Angeles building. Big Trouble was postponed as well, because it involved a nuclear bomb being smuggled on board an aircraft.

The trailers for Spider-Man, but not the film itself, were edited so that the clip showing Spider Man capturing a helicopter between the Twin Towers was deleted. In the actual movie, a shot of the World Trade Centre was deleted.

Many films were also digitally retouched following the tragedy - including Zoolander and Serendipity. The Jackie Chan film Nose Bleed, about a window cleaner on the WTC who foils a terrorist plot, was cancelled outright.

Episodes of many TV series were also removed or altered; the episode of The Simpsons, The City of New York vs. Homer Simpson, which was partially set at the WTC, was pulled from syndication or edited by some stations. So was the episode of 24 which showed an exploding plane, but the editing was tacky.

The Agency pilot episode, whose subject was terrorism, was juxtaposed with the fifth one. And so it went on... with SpongeBob Square Pants, Invader Zim, Married... with Children, and Law & Order: Criminal Intent, Sex and The City, the Sopranos, all having bits and bobs removed, or plot arcs revised, because they were deemed to be raw reminiscences of the attack, or in bad taste.

Ironically, as fodder for trivia aficionados, it was reported that the winner of the macabre game-cum-reality show Murder in Small Town X, aired on Tuesday, September 4, 2001, was Angel Juarbe, a firefighter from New York City, who was killed on September 11, 2001 - another is that Sylvester Stallone needed urgent medical attention after being knocked unconscious while filming a scene for the sixth Rocky film; and everyone thought he was still acting for a while.

In Malta, however, we tend to do things differently. Even a simple advertisement for insurance, which shows a ceiling fall on a cartoon couple that had been watching television in a storm, has not been pulled, or at least put on hold for a while, despite the recent tragedy in southern Germany, where exactly such an accident in a skating rink has proved fatal.

This week, Lou Bondì's guests were talking about the need for satire, which some of the panel appeared to think was akin to the proverbial pinch of salt... I have a feeling that the scene in which two foreigners, one of whom was holding a ticking bomb and offering $40 for a resident's Dodge (!) car, after asking for directions to Sears Tower, cut from one of the aforementioned series, would readily have been sanitised by a couple of them and repeated locally, even if the perpetrators had to become politicians - local or foreign - to keep within the bounds of decency.

In the programme, we were reminded how often people in the news (a.k.a. 'personalities') will actually pay to see themselves spoofed in programmes like Spitting Image or the equivalents... including the local Bla Kommixxin.

I always say that the pictures on radio are those on television - and that is why, perhaps the series KYTV never achieved the success of its radio progenitor, Radio Active. But there is just one instance where the adage may not be true; in the "taken for a ride" clips in l-Kotra Qamet f'Daqqa u Ghajtet.

The rhyme and reason of the sequences is having Ray Calleja, impersonator extraordinaire, as the taxi-driver, an oaf of the first water, insulting his fare. But then, again, if it's a case of mistaken identity, we are to understand that the verbal abuse would have been intended for the other person(s). This takes the phrase double-entendre to new heights (or is it lows?). And then there are the paparazzi of Liquorish.

What is it with Radju Malta? On Tuesday, the 2.15 p.m. live Italian music programme was both muffled and crackly for more than enough time than it would have taken the engineers to right the situation, or the presenter to apologise. Had it been a recording, the duty announcer could have aborted it and played the usual trite music, current stock-in-trade of PBS, even when it involves signature tunes for particular programmes going out at the wrong time. But although someone is supposed to be monitoring the quality of everything that goes out from all radio and television stations, this was not forthcoming.

On Wednesday, there was some confusion (a BBC report and a Maltese commentary aired simultaneously) in the 12 p.m. news bulletin; and although many news bulletins had included the fact that it had been an 'unfortunately gross mistake' to report the miners in the West Virginia disaster as being still alive, expounding upon the wrath of the relatives, the foreign newspapers reviewer, quoting from a newspaper, indicated that they were not dead. One expects the news to be true to its name, especially on the Station of the Nation, when it is not an acronym; i.e., up to date. Again, although this was a grave error (no pun intended), there was no apology.

That having been said, it is sometimes obvious that news items are lifted, and translated verbatim, from foreign bulletins. Why else would doctors be referred to as medici; and an operation as an intervent kirurgiku? What's wrong with tobba and operazzjoni?

And lura l-Egittu means 'back to' Egypt, rather than 'back in'.

LOU BONDÌ had done it with an ersatz bomb; the A70 crew did it, Iene-style, with those beyond-a-joke water pistols. Had they been armed with used engine oil rather than water, it would have been a serious affair; and probably there would have been many psychics with ready excuses about why they would have failed to foresee the vandalism.