All panes, no gains?

People who live in glass houses should draw the blinds, so that the gossip will not ooze out from between the panes and the casing.

Three sources from Labour Party headquarters have confirmed to me that Miguel Vella Haber has now officially tendered his resignation from One Productions as from last Tuesday; he still has to work through his termination notice period.

I am amazed that Vella Haber’s resignation has been accepted by the PL administration. When I was shown around the fantastic Starship Enterprise style control room at One Television, it was pointed out to me (several times) that he was the mind behind it all – as he also was behind the inception of Red Touch Phone.

• I was proud to see Danica Muscat on Io Canto (Canale 5) last Tuesday.

Chosen out of literally thousands of hopefuls, Muscat had to make it through several auditions, and was eventually shortlisted. Her impeccable performance last Tuesday made us proud. She won a special place in Gerry Scotti’s heart; he has a soft spot for Malta.

Muscat had the honour of opening the show; being chosen to sing the Sigla is no mean feat, and the icing on the cake was singing with Ornella Vanoni.

• There are myriad topics to tackle on television – activism, civics, culture, disability, economics, education, heritage, icons, religion... Yet on Tuesday both One and Net (so what’s new?) threw caution to the wind and indulged in a dash of schadenfreude by broadcasting the funerals of the victims of the latest pyrotechnical tragedy.

Whatever happened to the embargo on close-ups? What purpose does this pathetic visual eavesdropping serve? As for the commentaries, the least said, the soonest mended. Suffice it to say that both sounded like a slow-motion football match commentary, complete with “hekk hu naraw it-twiebet, ħdejn xulxin, quddiem l-artal” (now we see the coffins side by side,) in front of the altar – stating the obvious is a pathetic way of filling up airtime, when reverential silence would have been infinitely better.

Yet again, I have to ask the director, cameramen and commentators – would you have done what you did if the people inside the coffins had been your relatives? Would you have wanted the camera to zoom on your bereaved mothers, catching the anguish in such a cruel, voyeuristic manner?

The funeral was picked up last Thursday morning by Daphne Cassar on Radju Malta. Doing the so-called ‘newspaper reviews’ (which are mostly daily headlines strung together and a word or two lifted off the articles) she explicitly chose to mention balconies and white flowers and relationships between victims and survivors.

• Ally McBeal and her legal eagle colleagues commune in the unisex restroom (read glorified community lavatory). The ragbag of employees in Camera Café probably spends more time in front of the coffee machine in the corridor (with occasional noisy forays into the toilets) than they do at their desks.

Enter the local, claustrophobic, flip-side of courtroom drama.

Lift is the new ups-and-downs (literally and figuratively) sitcom to be broadcast on Net’s new schedule, Mondays to Fridays at 7.30 p.m. The scripts are penned by the inimitable Malcolm Galea, and the episodes are directed by Bryn Manning.

This transport of delight is situated somewhere within the bowels of a building that houses (yes, of course) another legal firm. The staff members are played by Audrey Harrison, Stefan Cachia Zammit, Joseph Zammit, Lydya Zastera and Stefan Farrugia (and then there’s the intern!) – but it is inevitable that well-known faces will make cameo appearances.

The idea is for viewers to get to know these people through their conversations and body language, and it should provide vicarious pleasure for people who, like me, avoid lifts but love people-watching.

Watch this space for more information on new programmes that were launched at last Friday’s Media.Link event.

• The people who vaunt their knowledge of Maltese sometimes fall flat on their faces. How long will it be before some presenters realise that, when introducing a programme for the evening, they are not to say ‘il-lejl it-tajjeb’, which means ‘good night’, but ‘il-lejla t-tajba’, which means ‘good evening’?

• The best compliment I got this week read, in part “I do not have a TV set, but I purchase the Sunday Times just to read your column...”

• The set for Bla Agenda has been changed. The new edition will go on air on October 9 – the format has also been tweaked somewhat. One of the guests for the forthcoming edition will be Tiffany Pisani, who is currently back in London in connection with the Britain’s Next Top Model contest. The young lady looks different from her most recent photo-shoots. She probably has something to tell us which has not already been splashed across the rags. The finals of the contest will be broadcast live and will depend 100 per cent on televoting.

Another guest will be Niamh Kavanagh.

• Pandora will from this season include a new section; paranormal news from the world over. Ruth Frendo has managed to interview David Thompson – one of those notoriously controversial mediums who allegedly exudes ectoplasm, for so-called ‘materialisation mediumship’. Thompson is British, but he now resides in Australia.

Thompson is known for conducting séances while bound and gagged; but is this a ruse? Who is William C Cadwell? What is the Silver Cord Circle? Frendo intends to find out. Will Thompson’s replies to her audacious questions convince the sceptics? After all, several people believed that the premise behind H G Wells’s Invisible Man was feasible.

television@timesofmalta.com