Cold cased

The infomercial aimed towards encouraging NGOs to apply for airtime on Public Broadcasting Services has gone out umpteen times; either to ensure listeners at different time bands are made aware of it, or because not too many entities applied the first few hundred times it was broadcast.

Nobody thought of writing numbers as they must be said in Maltese- Tanja Cilia

Not so the announcement that the Programme Statement of Intent, in which current and hopeful broadcasters put forward their propositions has been issued.

Applicants are to fill in a form with their details and those of the programme they intend presenting if their proposal is accepted.

I am disappointed that this form cannot be downloaded from the PBS website, which seems to be obsessed with the portrait gallery and jukebox of the contestants of the forthcoming Eurovision Song Contest.

I was under the impression producers and presenters were not only duty bound to use good Maltese; they had to provide the name of the language consultant whom they would be asking to mentor them.

I am sorely tempted to put in my own submission for a programme; L-Erbgħa Fost il-Ġimgħa would be a midweek 10-minute sardonic look at the world, where, of course, the quintessential adviser would be present because as a running gag I would purposely be trying to slip in English words.

Someone may now go right ahead and steal my idea; it will not be the first time this has happened on local broadcasting. I do not want credit – but it would be common courtesy to mention the publication from which my work and that of others would have been lifted. Some bone-lazy presenters just collate bits and bobs from different sources and translate them as they go along.

This is especially evident when the same piece of information is said three times, in the spoken parts between short snatches of music, and other items of information are not repeated.

It would be nice to have a pool of writers coming up with new radio plays, week after week. Each person from the good old days of Rediffusion who is interviewed here and there seems to reminisce fondly about the radio plays that used to be broadcast – most seem to mention how sound effects used to be homemade and not obtained through the click of a mouse.

These, after a stint in which a series of them used to be broadcast during the weekend, seem to have died the death.

It is obvious, from the blatant wrong use of the vernacular, that this is being done anyway, by broadcasters proper – perhaps because the people who actually need professional help do not think they do.

Meanwhile, I note that cooks, interior decorators, art critics, fashion designers, and anyone else who occasionally needs to use the word ‘texture’ have not yet found the Maltese word for it. Is it not time for the Akkademja to provide us with one?

The forthcoming elections in the US are giving local newscasters another opportunity to mangle proper nouns by placing accents in the wrong places and giving Maltese pronunciations to foreign surnames.

It becomes especially annoying when two or three people in the same news bulletin pronounce the sets of names differently.

For quite a long time I have been campaigning for the heads of news on television and radio stations to give their staff a list of names and their phonetic pronunciation equivalents. Until that day comes, this abysmal state of unprofessionalism will continue. This follows in the heels of the near-constant transmitting of numbers, specifi-cally amounts of money, badly, during the recent fundraising campaigns.

It would seem that nobody ever thought of writing down numbers as they must be said in Maltese – a way that is different from how they are said in many other languages – in order to teach them to listeners and viewers who appear not to know them, either. And the problem will get worse if at kindergarten and primary school levels, numbers are taught to children “in English because they are easier”.

• It’s become fashionable for social sites to provide listeners and viewers space for their opinions – especially when they cannot get through to programmes on air because the phones in studios are ringing off the hooks, sending an e-mail may not elicit a reply, and sending an SMS will cost more than it ought to.

It is a pity some broadcasters think all the postings made on their pages are sincere, and, for that matter, made by people whose names are really those indicated online.

• Joe Tanti is back doing what he loves best. “It’s good to be back on radio. This is my 25th year at the turntables – which do not really exist any more, anyway – on radio. Four years of this quarter-century I have spent here on One Radio. The longest I’ve been on the same radio station is five years on 89.7 Bay. This is therefore going to be the record-breaker year for me.

Radio is my life. Listeners at One radio have welcomed me back heartily.”

And, I would say, Tanti has taken many listeners away from other stations, too, albeit for just his breakfast show – after which they switch back to their usual programming.

• Nisġa will also be back on air, from February, and also on a different radio station – which indeed is a pity as the audience of Campus FM is much smaller than that of PBS.

In an ideal world, the programme would have still been on the ‘station of the nation’, and relayed as a repeat on Campus FM, as are some other programmes; magazine programme guests harp about how important it is to have our heritage taught by every means possible.

Watch this space for further details, or contact Roderick Busuttil and Joe Brincat on their pages on the aforementioned social sites.

television@timesofmalta.com