Death can magically absolve a man of all his misdeeds. Michael Jackson's magically vanished when he suffered a coronary and now that the same fate has claimed Mike Bongiorno's life he too is riding the crest of a wave of public approbation.
In the Thursday issue of The Times, Charles Xuereb and Enrico Gurioli mourn the showman's passing with two full-length articles, occupying an entire newspaper sheet. As an eulogy, it seemed excessive right from the start and that was before I even started reading it. "Goodbye Mike. The Italian world of media and culture is weeping," blubs Mr Gurioli. "It is crying over the death of an honest man with principles; honest in the way of doing television, honest in his relationship with his viewers and honest with his friends."
Such redoubtable honesty! Is Mr Gurioli paying homage to a latter-day Samaritan who wandered the earth in sackcloth and ashes or a TV presenter who raked in millions of dollars, shilling brand-name goods on Italian national TV?
We really must get out of this pervasive habit of painting human character in soot and whitewash. It may well be true that Mike Bongiorno was a good family man, father and husband, but that is hardly our concern. We must instead limit ourselves to a diagnosis of his public character and an examination of his contribution to the common weal. I believe a fair and balanced report of Mike Bongiorno's legacy would have been far more level-headed and far less cloying.
"The excitement was contagious in its interactive invitation to entice viewers in trying to guess the answer or at least sympathise with one bravu participant against another," simpers Mr Xuereb in his encomium.
Can these commentators be in earnest? Am I alone in seeing Mike Bongiorno's manicured voice, choreographed gestures, rehearsed sound-bites and the canned laughter of his studio audiences for what they really were: an exercise in keeping the people compliant, distracted and suggestible?
If Mike Bongiorno was important, he was important for all the wrong reasons. Here was a man at the vanguard of television, a pioneering technology that started out with a very sinister aim in mind: the creation of dissatisfaction with the old and the outmoded, thus keeping people buying, buying, buying and, therefore, working, working, working to get the money to do so. In other words, its purpose was to keep people enslaved to a work-consume ethic and keep the lucrative war economy on indefinite life-support.
Mike Bongiorno was one of the grandmasters behind this ingenious and seemingly innocuous technology and he lent his friendly voice, kindly gestures and infectious personality to the service of Mammon and all those who could afford his asking price. But Mike Bongiorno's death is of no consequence to his stomping grounds, the corrupt and insane world of television.
His crown is probably already being fought over behind closed doors, in terms and language far more cut-throat than the viewing public is accustomed to glimpsing on quiz shows. Such is the nature of back-room television politics and such is the nature of the society television has helped create.
I ask that this letter be published as a necessary counter-weight to Mr Xuereb's and Mr Gurioli's glutinous accounts of Mike Bongiorno's career, and I beg the indulgence of anyone who believes I have done a disservice to Mike Bongiorno's memory by pronouncing my mind about him.