Basking in a soft green glow Ireland, for the Italian media, exists t o provide occasional weekend-supplement travel articles. The island is remote (yet easily reachable by low-cost airlines, they stress), and populated by young creative types guzzling guinness. It is also, reassuringly, a Catholic country. Given that Ireland is rarely in the news here, […]
The TV news, inexplicably, chose not to run with footage of General Augusto Pinochet proudly standing on his balcony (God, how fascists lover their balconies) beside ‘Santo Subito‘ Pope John Paul II back in 1987. “Why bring up the late-great Pope when discussing the death of Pinochet? cries the devil’s advocate from stage left. “After […]
Perhaps, if only he’d stop moving. Rumours of Berlusconi’s demise, in what has become a tedious pattern, have been exaggerated. On Saturday, leading an anti-government march, Berlusconi was, without doubt, the star of the show. And it was a show that drew thousands into Rome’s Piazza San Giovanni (a location not chosen by chance – […]
One of the pre-requisites for a website/service to qualify for the trendy ‘Web2.0’ label, as coined by gurus like Tim O’Reilly, is that it be designed for ‘remixability’. To quote O’Reilly: “the most successful web services are those that have been easiest to take in new directions unimagined by their creators.” Google is, in many […]
A foreign journalist (whose name escapes me now), in the pages of the excellent Internazionale magazine, over the summer lamented the top-heavy nature of the Italian media – or the over-importance it gives to the ruling institutions. For example, it’s enough that Italian President Napolitano opens his mouth and it will be reported with fanfare […]
“Paedophile priests – The wrath of the Pope” screamed the headline in La Repubblica last week, mirroring the general news coverage of Papa Ratzi’s stern words on the topic addressed to visiting Irish Bishops. A two page spread followed in the paper, informing Italian readers who, perhaps behind the times, may not have heard about […]
The story goes like this: Le Iene, an irreverent investigative/satirical programme (which given the restrictive nature of Italian TV is no mean feat), posing as a team from a fictional TV channel, outside Italy
Italian TV schedules have over the last four or five years fallen prey to the ‘reality’ format. The initial success of Grande Fratello [Big Brother] led executives in both the public (RAI) and private networks (most noticeably Berlusconi’s Mediaset) scrambling to import various other simple, and most-importantly, tele-votable formats. An industry has sprung up providing […]
If you’re looking for the place where Michael Jackson intersects with Al-Qaeda, look no further than Algerian born novelist Aziz Chouaki’s The Star of Algiers. Have we got your attention? Good. In truth, Jackson figures only slightly in this urgent, rythmic novel, and then only as a musical/cultural influence on the protagonist Moussa Massy, but […]
Reading Shane Barry’s commentary on financial scandals surrounding Bertie Ahern, it struck me that his posts could be applied, with virtually no changes, to the Italian situation. The Gombeen factor is to be found alive and well internationally – if that’s any consolation to Mr Barry. Only the names and donation sums need to be […]
