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©I TA LY DA I LY, THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 30 , 2 0 0 0
©©By Laura Collura
ITALY DAILY STAFF
Tonight, the homes of Italy's snootiest intellectuals will become animated with chatty dinner parties, as has happened every Thursday in the past three months.
Thursday is the big night for Il Grande Fratello, Italy's wildly successful version of the pan-European genre of Big Brother programs. The show kicked off in September, when ten voung people were first locked up in a house in the Cinecitta studios of Rome and cameras began filming their actions 24 hours a day for cable TV.
Unlike other universally loved shows, Il Grande Fratello's package of diehard fans includes a sizable group of literati, who can't resist the temptation of savoring the convolutions of the cooped-up 20-somethings—one of whom gets thrown out every two weeks.
On alternate Thursdays, two or more contestants are "nominated" for elimination. Then, the following week, one is actually evicted from the house. Those are the nights when no self-respecting snob would be caught anywhere but watching the special broadcast on Canale 5, a non-cable channel. "I always tell people who come to my house for dinner on Thursday nights: We're watching Il Grande Fratello," said Carlo Rossella, the editor of Panorama newsmagazine, which in recent weeks devoted full-page, news-analysis-like stories to the show. "I normally don't accept invitations out on Thursdays."
Yes, you can believe the hype. If you don't know who was kicked off the show last Thursday you're out of touch. (It was Marina, a Catania student who was labeled as both a "sexsymbol" and a "tease.")
According to Christian Rocca, a journalist with the highbrow daily Il Foglio Il Grande Fratello is so grande that it merits a daily column, "Pietromania," which he devotes to Pietro Taricone the show's macho Neapolitan contribution.
"It's like a soccer match: Everyone watches it, but with different filters," said Mr. Rocca, whose conservative broadsheet is considered one of Italy's more elitist publications. "When there's a big game, the hooligan is there to watch, but so is the intellectual writer who puffs on his pipe and thinks of something smart to say afterwards. They both enjoy it."
Mr. Rossella pushes the explanation a step further. For him, the "in" crowd can't help watching Il Grande Fratello because it is ultimately curious about how the populace spends its days.
"The rich and snobby don't normally mingle with the commoners," he said. "So Il Grande Fratello allows them to get a glimpse of what life is like in mass-tourism resorts, in popular discos, in working-class neighborhoods. In short, they get a chance to watch a world that is unknown to them."
It's not just that, though. At soirees in honor of Big Brother, intellectual viewers appear sincerely involved and become rabidly partisan over this or that contestant. And though some try to shroud their preoccupation in ironic comments, they're just as convincing as the self-proclaimed cynics who can't help weeping at smarmy movies.
In Il Grande Fratello, the main kindling element is a tame form of sadism — which prompts the audience to watch more closely when jealousy scheming and strife break out.
When producers sent a puppy into the house to jazz up the contestants' lives, Mr. Rocca said he was peeved. "I knew they'd spend the next two days cuddling the dog, and as a result they would temporarily stop scheming against one another—but that's precisely what I enjoy: vicious intrigue," he said.
Some maintain that Il Grande Fratello's elite fans are essentially trying to indirectly support center-right leader Silvio Berlusconi, a media magnate who owns Mediaset, the network that produces the show, as well as Mondadori, the publisher of Mr. Rossella's weekly, Panorama. Il Foglio, where Mr. Rocca works, is also seen as part of Mr. Berlusconi's group of backers: Its editor, Giuliano Ferrara, served as a minister in Mr. Berlusconi's seven-month government in 1994 and ran on a center-right ticket in a 1997 special election.
But the pro-Berlusconi theory doesn't really hold water because Il Grande Fratello boasts a bipartisan audience. On the one hand, it is true that when the program kicked off, many left-wingers blasted it as immoral in what appeared to be a knee-jerk reaction. But many others, including Democratic Left leader Walter Veltroni, unabashedly admit they don't mind following the show. Some left-wingers even work for it.
Such is the case of Fabrizio Rondolino, once a spokesman for Massimo t D'Alema, the first post-communist to serve as prime minister Mr. Rondolino, who left his previous job after causing a political scandal by writing an erotic novel, is currently working as the communication manager of Il Grande Fratello.
"This is really a bipartisan phenomenon," Mr. Rondolino said. "Everyone knows I'm a left-winger. But the show has nothing to do with politics, really and it is foolish for anyone to insist in despising or ignoring it. Those who still do that are old-fashioned intellectuals—you know, the same kind of people who 15 years ago would look down on soccer as a plebeian occupation and who believe that culture should be boring and only come in print form."
According to Mr. Rondolino, the epitome of this brand of passe eggheadedness is Eugenio Scalfari, the founder o Rome daily La Repubblica. Sure enough, Mr. Scalfari recently wrote in his weekly letter column: "Miltions of people watch Il Grande Fratello. Personally I am quite negatively impressed by the public's interest toward this show, as I consider the pro gram ... absolutely inane. But many people like it. It's a fact. We should understand why"
Ironically, one of Mr. Scalfari's former protegees, journalist Barbara Palombelli, represents the apex of across-the-board collaboration. Not only is Ms. Palombelli a reporter with La Repubblica, but she is also the wife of Rome Mayor Francesco Rutelli, the center-left's candidate for prime minister—in other words, Mr. Berlusconi's leading rival to govern the country.
Mr. Rondolino prides himself in having actually initiated the Thursday night tradition of Il Grancte Fratello highbrow parties. Each week, he entertains friends and celebrities in his Rome apartment, including Grande Fratello stars like the show's main host Daria Bignardi.
Claiming he had predicted that the intelligentsia—"Well, the best part of the intelligentsia," he said—would have fallen for the show, Mr. Rondolino goes so far as to compare Il Grande Fratelto to Umberto Eco's 1980 bestseller novel, "'The Name of the Rose."
"It was a popular book, a mass success—but it was written by a first-class professor, it was set in the Middle Ages and had philosophical undertones, so it also stimulated intellectuals," he said. "Likewise, Il Grande Fratello is a cultural product with different layers of meaning."
That's also the belief of Aldo Grasso, the famously strict television critic of Corriere della Sera, who recently announced that Il Grande Fratello forced him to change his mind about many things.
"This laboratory," he recently wrote, "is extremely new because it is manifold and at the same time uses different media—it works on normal TV, on cable TV, on the web and on cell phones. Each segment of public gets its type of communication."
© Italy Daily/IHT 2000
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