Ping pongs

Incest. Suicide. Domestic violence. Three topics that are by no stretch of the imagination funny. Yet victims of any one of them happening within their personal circles sometimes become the butt of vulgar jokes.

Administrations of different stations do not look upon their employees in the same way- Tanja Cilia

These topics are sometimes treat­ed lightly in the local media and since there appears to be no provision for this in regulations about watersheds and advertising and such like, presenters and guests get away with it.

The fact that Brikkuni (one of the best local groups ever) keep turning up on One could easily be interpreted that they have signed a lifelong contract with the station.

They appeared also on Affari Tagħ­­na. By the time the song’s lyrics informed us that ‘de man’ had five daughters, none of whom had a boyfriend, we knew where the storyline was leading. Indeed, the story’s last line told us all the grandchildren resembled their grandfather.

I found it distasteful that in between the beginning and the end of the song, mention was made of two political murders. However, it is obvious that in this genre of programme, aired as it is on a political station, there must perforce be injected a dose of tainted current events under any pretext available.

When a person is young, it is probably ‘fun’ to be invited to be on the panel of a radio or TV programme. As one gets older, life gets in the way, and sometimes, being present en­tails juggling other commitments.

Sometimes it ends up being a personal favour to the presenter, either when the actual guests cancel their appearance at the last minute, or because airtime has to be filled somehow, and hearing the same voice throughout the programme tends to get boring, albeit there may be musical interludes.

Incidentally, it is also very, very boring to have the presenters of a programme feature in most, if not all, the adverts in the programme. There was a time when this wasn’t allowed.

It is also annoying to hear promotions for the same programmes over and over again. One feels that certain presenters call presentation officers and/or technical officers every day to remind them to put their clips on air.

Is it possible no one realises how boring it is to listen to the same clips, over and over again, from before a series begins, to the time it is time for another schedule to start?

There are two sides to this argument – I hold with the one that says familiarity breeds contempt.

And speaking of blurbs, it is the responsibility of journalists who feed foreign colleagues to provide correct information. We all know what happens when people’s names are keyed into so-called ‘encyclopaedia’ sites; something unprofessional people do in order to plump out their writing.

‘Haters will hate’, the idiom goes, so it makes sense to have a human source to whom to attribute any information included in scripts and on-air comments.

I can personally vouch for the fact that not everything that in the recent past has appeared on Wikipedia is the truth. In fact, I was personally responsible for one particular entry, about a local media personality, being deleted.

Despite the forewarnings of the presenters, sometimes guests tend to go overboard in their comments; the presenter’s finger is not always prompt enough to press the delay button; that is why for instance, in rare cases we have heard blasphemies and vulgarities.

Even here – the measures taken against different people are different, since the administrations of different stations do not look upon their employees in the same way.

This is not an ‘only in Malta’ happening, however. Some young Disney presenters who ‘erred’ were booted out of their presenter roles, and some were ‘forgiven’ after being given the opportunity to make a public apology about how they might have misled their fan base.

But I digress.

One of the guests in a chat show last week told us to take a running jump. What he actually said was that one who loses enthusiasm for life might as well go to Dingli “without a parachute”.

I could picture the presenter and the other guest(s) wince – so they tried to turn round this statement into one meaning how much fun it would be to take a walk along the roads of this village, in the bracing air.

Some time ago there was a sub-plot – more of a vignette – in a television drama that was supposed to be funny but was anything but.

A character invited a married couple, one of whom happened to be his boss, for dinner. It so happened that the boss was the woman – and the wife of the said character did not like it that her man was ‘bossed about’ by a woman at work.

Had this been a farce in the Sala Tal-Kappillan, she would probably have spat in the soup and even, perhaps, used appropriate body language involving the fingers. But this particular drama has a following that probably expects things other than the hackneyed revenge scenarios.

The wife decides to get her own back on her husband, rather than on the guest. So she presses the prongs of a fork to his thighs. This action is obviously accompanied by dirty looks, and a bad attitude. And the approach was such that we are supposed to laugh at the hapless man.

So, just as I often ask when newscasters and presenters will be given a list of phonetic spellings for proper nouns and certain other words, I have to ask again – what, exactly, do the regulations pertaining to the watershed cover?

The Broadcasting Authority is not only there to monitor programmes so as to fine companies behind cookery shows featuring alcohol before the watershed, or to slap penalties on those who offer subliminal advertising.

television@timesofmalta.com