I’ve never enjoyed other people’s misfortunes quite as much as I did on Friday night. The news that a power outage had hit the Junior Eurovision song contest came as music to my ears – easily the winning entry, in fact. That probably means I need to get out a bit more. But first, the sources of my bile.

The Junior Eurovision is an irrelevant non-event. It is not true that millions of people all over Europe glue themselves to their television sets to watch it. I mean, really, who would want to spend a Saturday evening watching a junior version of something as insufferable as the Eurovision song contest? I’d guess the parents of the children taking part, and that’s about it.

Nor is it true that it stands to generate a wave of publicity that will make Malta the hottest tourist destination in the world and leave souvenir vendors in Paris, Rome, and London destitute.

My Wikipedia tells me that last year’s contest was held in Ukraine, and Georgia and Armenia before that. Ukraine aside for painful reasons, I’ve yet to meet someone whose appetite to visit Armenia was whetted by little Vladimir Arzumanyan’s rendition of that timeless classic, Mama.

The third reason why I was delighted my voodoo magic did wonders for the power supply had to do with the usual little-islander nationalistic delusions business. It wasn’t just that ‘all eyes are on us’, we were told (rubbish, of course). It was also yet another example of the greatness of Maltese talent.

Someone sent me a link the other day to a tweet that went, ‘it-talent Malti jerġa’ jagħmilha’ (‘Maltese talent does it again’). My stomach safely occupied in the bathroom, I went to look it up. It turned out it had to do with the magnificence of the stage or something.

I can’t stand this constant urge to parade the country’s imagined might. For example, I find Joseph Calleja’s antics with the Maltese cross undervest and ‘Maltese tenor’ this and ‘no place like Malta’ that highly irritating. The fact that Calleja happens to hold a passport that looks like mine is completely irrelevant.

Calleja is a hugely talented singer and that’s more than fine by me. And no, I wouldn’t wish for an outage at the Met. The artistic factor is just too great in that case.

There’s a fourth and more serious reason why the Junior Eurovision so rubbed me the wrong way. On Tuesday evening I settled in for Times Talk, the first of the week’s offerings of watchable news programmes on TVM. Only I found myself watching a schoolboy from Azerbaijan prancing about that magnificent stage.

No matter, I would wait and watch Realtà and the usually-excellent Dissett instead. But no, it was a six-year-old from Moldova on Wednesday and the cute Latvian twins on Thursday. TVAM, too, gave over chunks of its airtime to the contest. Xarabank was aired as normal, but then Xarabank is usually about the Eurovision in any case.

Unbelievably, someone at our national television station had decided to ditch an entire week’s news programmes for an endless round of bratty caterwauling. And I don’t mean the sighful inevitability of the final night either. We got to watch every damned minute of the rehearsals, interviews with the singers, the various state visits to the place, and so on.

I don’t know whose decision this was. I do know that they should be booed off their job for disservice to the public. I would even consider investigating them for aural crimes against humanity, given the content of the Junior Eurovision.

As if the injury bit weren’t bad enough, I got to know last Friday that the Nationalist Party had filed a complaint to the Broadcasting Authority that the previous week’s Times Talk had sinned. Madly enough, it seems that Herman Grech and Mark Micallef invited the Transport Minister to discuss transport. That invitation was not extended to the PN spokesman.

Unbelievably, someone at our national television station had decided to ditch an entire week’s news programmes for an endless round of bratty caterwauling

Let’s quietly leave aside the thought that the PN should secretly be delighted that Joe Mizzi was granted a solo performance. (The man is as loud as he is ignorant.) The fact remains that there can be no issue of imbalance here, other than that of the decibel type.

Whatever the magnitude of his talent Malti, Mizzi is a Cabinet minister. That means he gets to speak not on behalf of the Labour Party, but rather that of a democratically-elected government that represents Labourites, Nationalists and whatever else.

The reason I bring this up in a piece on the Junior Eurovision is that the Broadcasting Authority seems to have taken the PN’s pettiness seriously enough to call a hearing this Tuesday.

Now it happens to be the authority’s brief to oversee the quality of national broadcasting. The official website tells me that it “ensures that local broadcasting services consist of public, private, and community broadcasts that offer varied and comprehensive programming to cater for all interests and tastes”.

Problem is, the authority is fixated on the slightest scintilla of impartiality at the expense of broader issues of varied and comprehensive offerings. That a news programme should invite the government Transport Minister to talk about government’s plans for transport seems to be serious enough a breach to hold a hearing. That a whole week’s news programmes should be erased entirely, and in the run-up week to the Budget at that, isn’t.

Missing the wood for a fern, shall we say? Or, since it’s lyrical week, national broadcasting, going for a song.

I offer my sincere condolences to fellow columnist Lino Spiteri’s family.

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