Hear my whisper, Mr Speaker

Louis Galea's post electoral resolve to dedicate his energy to playing the piano was generally greeted with gentle scepticism. Our lawmakers, in their occasionally cruel wisdom, decided to assign to their Speaker a housekeeping chore, glorified by the term 'consolidation of democracy'. He is now compelled to exercise his deft fingers to unknot some unprettily tangled issues between the two parties. As an old-time adviser of his, do you think he can make it by the deadline?
As a total outsider in this matter I guess that Joseph Muscat's men may want the rapid establishment of state subsidies for the political parties as payback due to them for their consent to the pairing badly needed by the globetrotting and especially Brussels-visiting government members.

I have this suspicion because in spite of both Joe Saliba's and Michael Falzon's assurances that they had carefully controlled electoral campaign expenditure, nevertheless neither party can have spent less than a quarter of a million.

The 'Americanisation' of our electoral campaign that enabled Alfred Sant to win the 1996 election does not allow any lesser expenditure (Barack Obama's costs for next November's event will easily surpass the billion dollar mark).

Now I see a link between this issue and another item proposed by the Labour Party for the agenda of the Parliamentary Select Committee. This is reform of the Public Broadcasting Service.

The idea that I wish to whisper into Mr Speaker's ear is that he take the opportunity provided by the financial straits of both party machines to suggest from his outside vantage point that they apply a drastic remedy to the haemorrhage of funds being suffered by both parties at present because of their TV stations.

Why don't they both agree to close them down if they manage to agree on the sort of PBS reform that Galea had up his sleeve when he was the minister responsible for broadcasting, before handing over the unaccomplished task to Austin Gatt?

When Super One began broadcasting, it obviously reaped a huge political advantage, because the PN did not have a channel of its own. But by now that advantage has been completely frittered away. The investment in studios and equipment can still be utilised since this is the age of outsourcing, and so many TV programmes (such as Xarabank) are no longer produced in-house. The party studios can be used for other purposes with better results both commercially and politically.

The savings on TV could be used to invest in new media, for instance, particularly if the discussion format of TV programmes in which one was allowed to finish more than one micro-sentence is now counted quaint and antique. If all content is to be fragmented into itsy-bitsy less-than-10-second items, then that content will be better delivered via mobiles.

Have you any ideas about what should be done with regard to the Public Broadcasting Service?
If PBS were to provide purely commercial scheduling, then it would be better privatised. However I do not think that broadcasting should be wholly for profit but that public value should be clear in the bulk of its programmes.

At present it seems as if the Public Broadcasting Service is being run as a business, but still benefitting from state subsidies in its competition with rival providers. This system is like the behaviour of a 25-year-old who should be living on his own resources but still keeps dipping into mum's purse, in order to show off better than his colleagues who are in fact cut off from maternal apron strings.

If our political parties were as really interested as they profess to be in family enhancement, then surely they should commit themselves to enable at least the Public Broadcasting Service to provide us with programmes that offer some real insight into people's lives and complex ways of solving family problems, rather than the home-grown versions of American sit-coms that are our stable fare at present.

This situation was captured in a cartoon that I saw lately of a TV presenter introducing families to the mass audience; the caption said: "Welcome to Kitchen Appliance Soap Opera", in which two families exchange toasters to see how the change affects their lives.

Would I be correct to conclude that you are not an enthusiast of either the get-money-for-nothing shows (like Deal or No Deal) or of the reality shows that try to ratchet up the psychodrama?
Public confessions of intimate tragedies are not fruitfully made by just letting words cascade out of a couple intent on mauling each other to shreds. For catharsis to come about, the mediation of art is required.

Fr Peter Serracino Inglott was talking to Miriam Vincenti.