THEY CAME FROM OUTER SPACE
date: 05 February 2012 at 19:40:51 - 0 comments
The Italian television has been invaded.
By aliens, I think.
They don’t have horns, they aren’t green, blue or translucent pink, but they are definitely a new species and certainly from a very different planet.
They look like people we have known and been bored by for years and years, but suddenly they are different. Energised or revitalised, so to speak. Suddenly awake. Questing and questioning… In the past, Italian tv was the final resting-place for clever minds and nimble tongues that had given up the fight and settled for comfort, a tasty salary, a cute bit of junior bum from RAI 1/2/3, or one of the other national television companies, and somebody smart who was writing the script.
They called themselves journalists, but they were – for the most part – mouthpieces, unofficial spokesmen and arbiters for all of the major political parties.
On the right-wing we had Bruno Vespa (The Big Brown Wasp in one of our recent blogs), the biggest toady of Berlusconi and all the jesters of the Emperor’s team. Got a new book coming out? “Dragons I have Slain or Thwarted Recently With My Own Bare Hands,” the autobiography of Angelino (Little Angel) Alfano, or the latest treatise by Giulio Tremonti (the lithping ex-Minithter of the Economy)? Bruno would give you an hour and a half on late-night tv and help you sell it. In exchange, when Bruno’s yearly book came out – a cavalcade of harmless political titbits and playful fawning jokes which endeared him to many – Silvio Berlusconi would regularly appear at the book presentation with Giulio, Alfanino and the rest of the clique, helping to push it at hundreds of thousands of hypnotised tv-watchers.
It’s on the TELLY, it MUST be good! The PM was there…
On the left, we had Lilli Gruber, a sexless sex-machine (no sex, please, we’re lefties!) who purses her lips (the ones directly below her nose) and flashes her inch-long eyelashes, and tells us the news the way it ought to be, according to the succession of wimpy left-wing parties going back to the Margherita (the treasurer stole €13 million from the kitty last week), or further back to the PDS (whose leader conned cheap luxury accommodation out of a pension-scheme fund for years and years, and bought himself a 30-foot yacht from the savings – a true-blue Communist, by the way), and all the way back to the old PCI, the Partito Comunista Italiano (this is twenty years ago) who had been funded secretly since the Second World war by Stalin, Kruschev and the good old USS of R…
Lilli, Bruno, Fabio Fazio and all the rest were in need of a shock.
Well, it happened.
The Aliens arrived…
Boss-alien Mister Monti came along, and mentioned that Italian party politics was in a sad state…
Suddenly, there was no script left, no political memoirs to sell, and no-one left to buy them. It was enough to make the warts sprout a-new on Bruno’s carefully powdered face, enough to deflate lips which have been bursting with silicone since the day the stuff went public.
What the hell are we going to do now?
You see it all the time on tv nowadays.
They’ve started asking questions. Real questions.
Where were you while Silvio was bunging his bunga? Where did you get that hat, where did you get that fabulous snazzy, immensely expensive hat? And the boat, and the house, and the amazing salary?
These alien journalists are damned good – green and pink, rather than red and blue.
Much better than the tired old bodies that they have chosen to inhabit for some inexplicable reason…
