Group therapy

It would seem that football aficionados will be placated, for want of a better word, by the recent decision taken by the Broadcasting Authority, with regard to the broadcasting rights of the 2006 FIFA World Cup.

Melita Cable, as the monopolistic cable television supplier that has purchased the rights, is bound by law to make arrangements with a local 'free-to-air' television channel to broadcast the final, third place final, semi-finals, and the quarter-finals. These matches have been deemed to be 'in the general interest of the public', and as such must not entail extra expenses for those who are already paying television licenses.

Melita Cable had, apparently, already undertaken an agreement with its channel of choice, that is, Smash - however, since this channel is not available to anyone who is not subscribed to Melita Cable, it had been six of one and half a dozen of the other.

Just to satisfy the curiosity of the pernickety, the decision was based on Regulation 6 (1) of Legal Notice 158/2000. This stipulates that broadcasters should not broadcast on an exclusive basis such events that the Broadcasting Authority considers as having comprehensive importance for society, in a way that a substantial part of the public is denied the possibility to follow the events through live coverage or deferred coverage on television without payment. There are also provisions to ascertain whether said coverage must be live or deferred, full or partial, and, one assumes, any possible permutation of these conditions.

Moreover, the Regulation itself is based on EU Directive 89/552/EEC, commonly known as the Television without Frontiers Directive; Malta had applied this in 2000. There are loads of other ifs and buts involved, but for the nonce, the above will suffice.

I never thought I'd miss a bilingual rabbit (she could understand gagga and 'jump') so much. However, although bilingual in a rabbit may be considered cute, it fails to impress in the media.

Why is it that almost anyone who is featured in a vox pop has to pepper an opinion (if one may stretch a word so far) with English words and indeed whole sentences? Sometimes, to add insult to injury, the sentence that would have been said in English is immediately repeated in Maltese, rather as if the interviewer, and the viewers when the clip is eventually broadcast, were stupid.

For all that, even the people who write newscasts think that we own not more than five brains cells in the least. At random, I picked out the Thursday morning news bulletins on Radio 101 and Super One. The latter informed us of the Karl Stagno Navarra story, but nothing of the most recent television viewership results. The former told us of the tiff between Joe Mifsud and John Attard Montalto, and boasted, just a wee bitsy, about the results. There were other puerilities, but let's not go into them here.

Then, of course, there were the (results of the) local council elections. People got out their pseudo-scientific calculators and ran amok with the "pigments" of their imagination. Sometimes, it happens that people who don't vote are supporting the Labour Party, sometimes they are voting against the Nationalist Party (which is not the same thing at all) and sometimes, they just don't give two hoots. It all depends upon whether the chips that are down are the ones made from real potatoes, or the oven-ready ones.

Sometimes, choices are rather more esoteric; this week we heard how Soul singer Isaac Hayes had resigned, in a manner of speaking from the post of Jerome Chef McElroy, the school cafeteria cook-cum- agony uncle to the foul-mouthed kids on the South Park, Colorado school block... because the show had 'ridiculed religion.

Now we all remember how 'his' character had remained on the show - and the payroll - when Mormons, Jews, Christians and Muslims had been derided over ten years and 150 episodes. Apparently, what tipped the scales was a jib at the Church of Scientology, citing a "growing insensitivity toward personal spiritual beliefs in the media".

And while on the topic of cartoons that are cult watching for adults, it is worth noting that the Parents' Council recently indicted The Simpsons because although for the most part it was a clean show, it had mild sexual innuendo, with objectionable content in aspects of sex and religion.

The Council pointed out that Homer allowed the Mafia to film a pornographic movie in his house. Although there were no graphic depictions of sex, there was talk of lesbianism. The language, containing as it does "damn," "hell," and "crap" was deemed objectionable too; and I will refer to the topic of violence in a forthcoming column.

You really cannot get a qabar inside a muzew unless the latter is a mausoleum. A simple riffle through a dictionary would have told the lady journalist that a coffin, in Maltese, is a tebut. Incidentally, the vernacular for chives is kurrat. Imbaccna is not how to describe a chubby bitch; and the singers are not Mig-well Bose or Brabra Streisand. Need one insist upon a phonetic list of names, BBC-style, again?

In many countries - but not, apparently, in Malta - viewer-consumer unions complained about what they called "an explosion of white coats on television advertisements". This particular item of clothing gives the idea that a product is fully endorsed by the medical profession, even when the person doing the talking is not indicated as a doctor or pharmacist.

This phenomenon is also evident in those advertorials that attempt to persuade us we could do with shinier hair, whiter teeth, fuller lips, different vital statistics, diminished body hair, and less thread veins on the legs. I always wonder whether the Media Protection Act has anything to do with the fact that the 'before' and 'after' people are usually all foreign.

Insult of the Week went unnoticed by the caller to whom it was addressed. After she had told the resident expert about her trials and tribulations, he said - at least twice Inti Sod's Law, Sinjura...