Spies of life

Mars bars. My friend Louise will vouch for the fact that I only eat them - preferably frozen - when I am expecting. So I had to laugh when one of the e-mails I received this week asked whether I like them.

Part of the fun of having an e-mail address attached to a newspaper column is that people are more likely to respond to one's comments, than they would if they had to pick up pen and paper, and then ferret out an envelope and a postage stamp.

My comment about Magic raised the shackles of many. In fact I was taken aback that such an innocuous comment would elicit such a great amount of feedback. A staunch supporter of the station insisted that she likes Magic because she likes Mars bars. She loves both meanings of consistency obtaining in the station, and went on to mention the major differences between the layering of Magic's programming with highlights from what she called 'the caboodle of others'.

She offered to send me a Mars bar so I could "confirm" what she had said. As the Katie Melua song has it, then, both Magic and Mars bars are Just What It Says On The Tin.

Frankly, I expected Good Friday's music on Magic to be mainly from Godspell and Jesus Christ, Superstar; but it wasn't, when I was listening.

The Goldfish Bowl programme Big Brother (BBM) has been put on the back burner for the time being. Watermelon Productions will instead be behind a totally different concept of reality show from April 16.

L-Akbar Bluff will replace BBM. Moira Delia will be hosting this new prime time programme. Instead of swapping wives, homes, or holidays, as they do in other reality series, the Maltese contestants will be called upon to switch jobs, even if only for one day.

Heaven help the people who had a farmer for a hairdresser. One hopes he did not think he was weeding as he handled the shears, sorry, scissors.

Cameras will be following the protagonists as they 'bluff' their way through their career moves; the footage is then cleaned up and shown in front of a studio audience. The good news is that that lovely lady, Marica Mizzi, who joined Watermelon from Image 2000, is the producer.

And the general election has come and gone, and still the editorial board at PBS is without a chairman. This means that there has been enough time to draw up a shortlist of suitable candidates.

And of course, if a woman were elected to the post, she would make doubly sure that all teleshopping stints masquerading as magazine programmes or product placements would ever waste air-time on PBS again.

Like Magic, Xarabank is usually "what one expects it to be", whatever the format (and the increase in stage furniture clutter) - yet last Friday it took a slightly different tack.

The main idea saturating many people's brains appears to have been to needle Jason Micallef into anger. He countered by adopting a rictus and a strange vocabulary.

A part of the discussion running across the ether these days involves how the choice of a new Labour Party leader ought to be undertaken.

Now it is a well-known fact that many people hedge their bets by contributing tidy sums of money to both major parties. Others, who are less well off, do it on a smaller scale by paying to 'belong' to both these parties as fully paid-up members (ah, does that expression not ring a bell?).

At this point, it bears remembering what we say when "foreign" judges are fished out of nowhere to judge who ought to be our representative at the Eurovision Song Contest. If these people come from countries that would eventually be competing directly with us, would it not profit them to choose the 'worst' song of the lot?

Similarly, and logically, if people who are dyed-in-the-wool Nationalists at heart, are called in with the tesserati tal-Labour to vote for Alfred Sant's successor would it not behove them to choose someone who will lead the party downhill all the way?

I have just realised that I have had egg on my face for nigh on three weeks. The character played by Yul Brynner, who said "So shall it be written, so it shall be done!" was not King Mongkut of Siam, but Ramses II in The Ten Commandments.

"Cumulative ratings" and "time-shift" are two new important buzz terms when it comes to compiling audience surveys - but not in Malta. It would seem that the time of Nielsen 'people metres' is dead and buried; audience measurement will henceforth do away with "viewing diaries" that the poll-takers favour, and replace them with questions about how many omnibus editions of bootleg equivalents of Pupi or Gizelle the audience would have watched. This could be a good thing, and may be said to be another bite off a Mars bar.

Silly television joke of the week: Two aerials met on a roof, fell in love and got married. The ceremony was rubbish but the reception was brilliant. There must be a moral there, somewhere.

television@timesofmalta.com