Silvio Berlusconi was accused of turning Italian television into a laughing stock yesterday as a searing documentary about the impact of the Prime Minister's media empire premiered in Venice.

"Television has invaded the collective imagination of the country," Erik Gandini, director of "Videocracy", told a press conference at the Venice Film Festival.

"Outsiders laugh at our television, and at Berlusconi... but it has had a very notable impact on our country."

The documentary by Mr Gandini, who lives in Sweden but was born and brought up in Italy, takes an eye-opening look at both the output on the Italian prime minister's three channels and how it has shaped the country's psyche.

Game shows and variety shows featuring scantily clad women, as well as soap operas, now seen by many as a ticket to wealth, fame or power, dominate the channels operated by the Berlusconi family's Mediaset group.

Mr Gandini said that there was an unusually strong link between television and those who exercise power in his native land.

"In Italy, television and power are really connected in a way that's very unusual," he said.

"Banality is presented as innocuous... but in Italy it has become a political tool," he added.

"You can have a career without knowing how to do anything," he said, pointing to the most prominent example of the Minister for Equal Opportunities, Mara Carfagna, a former showgirl from one of Mr Berlusconi's TV networks.

The world of Italian television has become a "monster" that "has really used women as objects," he said.

In the film, a young man hoping to make the big time complains that he is outnumbered by woman wanabees: "So many girls are willing to do anything to get on the fast track to stardom," he sighs.