As though there isn’t enough religion swilling about this country, we’re going to get an even greater dose of it with UTV. This sounds like a contraceptive device that has to be inserted under general aesthetic, but it’s not. UTV is the grand folly of a priest who is spending his money on setting up a religious television station. Dun Gwann Farrugia has ploughed half a million liri of inherited wealth into the Luqa-based station, which will “spread God’s word and help people in need”. It sounds like the perfect vehicle for Rachel Vella of Tista Tkun Int, who has fallen out with Public Broadcasting Services and will be taking her business elsewhere. That Rachel is a good illustration of how people became popular saints in medieval times. A couple of hundred years on and she’d be painted carrying her breasts on a silver platter and her eyes in her hands, with people praying to her to cure their son’s gammy leg or their daughter’s curly hair.

Trouble is brewing already for UTV, and it’s only just started to broadcast. I’m hoping that the project isn’t aborted, because I hate all Maltese television – too boring, too full of women made up with a trowel, too much overwrought acting and too many people shouting over each other – so I’m looking forward to lots of interesting viewing of my favourite religious subjects. And no, I’m not joking. I’d rather watch a debate about whether gay men should be allowed to marry, given that their anatomy doesn’t fit together like plugs and sockets, than I would a pseudo-serious talk-show packed to the rafters with grey and beige men setting Malta to rights and thinking how very important they are. All UTV has to do is give Josie Muscat and that mad bat with the stick a chat show to host and I’ll be over the moon. I might even start a couple of rosary-parties like some people do with the Eurovision Song Contest – lots of snacks, some bottles of wines, and rosary beads. Chanting can be meditative, and chanting along with the television might well turn out to be the spiritual equivalent of jumping around to a Jane Fonda exercise video.

I should be so lucky, though. The station’s director has left already, in a black funk. He told a reporter that he could no longer stand the “mediocrity and hard-headedness” of the station’s owner. “It’s either everything as he says, or nothing,” Edgar Bonnici Cachia said. He revealed that the television station was set up with no feasibility studies, and that broadcasting had begun without a plan for programming. Capital investment ate up all their cash so that there was none left to spend on programmes. By October, UTV is supposed to switch to a full schedule, but Bonnici Cachia can’t imagine how that is going to happen. “It’s too amateurish,” he said.

UTV has the largest studios in Malta, and even an outside broadcasting unit that Dun Gwann bought to broadcast Mass and the rosary live every day. Call me a heretic, but I think God would have been a lot happier had he spent that half a million on improving the lives of children who live in care homes, or women who live in shelters. But who am I to judge? Each to his own: some people (very few, actually) spend their half-million on a nice boat. Others go for a television station. In the luxury-and-power stakes, the television station wins hands down. I wonder how our rather large conspicuous-consumption-as-a-competitive-sport brigade never thought of that one before.

This television station seems to have been a bit of a dream for the priest. I first heard about it years ago. An anonymous ‘friend’ described him to a reporter as “enthusiastic and well meaning” but with no knowledge of the media. “He wants to set up this television station as a monument,” the so-called friend said. “He really believes in spreading Christ’s message through television, but he knows nothing about it.”

* * *

Much as I look forward to a full winter UTV schedule of prayer meetings, Mass and the rosary broadcast live every day, interspersed with the sort of subjects I enjoy getting annoyed about, I can’t help but groan inwardly at what has happened to television in Malta. Television pluralism was meant to break away forever from the rigid State monopoly on broadcasting, and to help make Malta more democratic. Instead, pluralistic television has entrenched and reinforced the Maltese power structure, with one station owned by the state, one by the opposition party, another by the government party, a fourth that’s tiny and does itself no favours, and now a fifth owned by a priest preaching the word of God.

Now PBS is being run like a business, which is something that should never happen to a public service broadcaster, which is, by definition, a public service set-up and not a profit-making one. Public service broadcasting is there to do all the things that private broadcasters can’t or won’t do – like spending money on well-made programming. Public service broadcasters are in an entirely different category to other broadcasters. They do not have the same role, and they do not compete with them. Some public broadcasters are not allowed to sell advertising, deriving their revenue instead from television licence fees. In Malta, it’s a hallata ballata. We pay a television licence fee, and our public service broadcaster competes like crazy with private stations to get as much advertising revenue as possible. Worse still, it sells its airtime to production companies, which then fund their shows by selling advertising on them. Public service broadcasters are supposed to buy programmes from production houses, and here’s our public service broadcaster selling its airtime to production houses instead, with a Dutch auction at the start of every season to see who’s ready to pay the most. No wonder the whole thing is a mess.

Apparently, they are brawling in the aisles about the winter schedule now at PBS. I can’t work up any interest because the disparity between what’s available on terrestrial television and what’s available through cable is so great that I no longer watch TVM, Net, Super One or Smash, though I am holding out hope for UTV, if only for the fun I might have. When I check out any of them just in case Dun Gorg Preca has worked another miracle and things have improved, I continue to be assailed by the sound of a room full of people talking at each other without listening (“Isma hej, issa t-tern tieghi! Int mhux diga tkellimt, hija?” “Listen you, it’s my turn now! Haven’t you already had your say?), and trying to mow each other down with sound.

It’s either that, or some pretty grotesque acting in one of those dramatic soap operas, with ham actors striking poses straight out of 18th-century theatre. The other day, I found myself watching with morbid fascination something called Gizelle. I don’t even know whether I’ve spelled it right. After all, the other day I came across a Ladybird book at a friend’s house, and it was called Pinokkjo – which would make me Dafni, I suppose, were a Ladybird book ever to be written about me.

My viewing life changed the day Melita Cable decided we weren’t quite in the sticks any more, what with rampant building and so on, and wound their wire down the hill. Gosh, what a relief – liberated for ever from the yakkety-yakkety-yaks with their bad manners and their uncouth way of speaking and their block-headed ideas and their rubbish acting – and all those sale-sale-sale adverts and virtual tours of emporiums selling pots, pans and various items of stretch clothing straight off a cart on the Catania market. I’m convinced that the main reason Maltese television is so popular is because most people are not sufficiently fluent in English to follow the incomparably better programming on some of the other channels. That’s why Gizelle rockets to the top of the charts and when you mention Waking the Dead or Silent Witness, only a few people know what you’re talking about.

Most people don’t watch the wealth of channels on cable for the very same reason that I never, ever watch Italian television: they have to work too hard to follow what’s being said. Maltese television’s viewing figures are being bulked up by people who have to struggle to follow a programme in English or Italian, and so switch over to the joys of Net, Super One, Smash and TVM instead. You can’t say that it’s because of the fabulous down-home programming, because the programming begins with c and ends with p.

* * *

And now I have a confession to make: I absolutely adore Eastenders. Every Saturday and Sunday between 6pm and 7pm, I won’t answer the phone, won’t speak to anybody who asks me a question, and will bite the head off anyone who makes the mistake of saying “Hi, I’m home.” If I have to be out at that time, then I rush home at midnight like Cinderella in my pumpkin, just in time to watch the late-night repeats of the day’s episodes.

When my sister’s Eastenders-mad friend texted her from London to say that Stella had jumped off the roof in her wedding dress (they’re some episodes ahead there), I camped out on the sofa from 5.30pm with tea, biscuits and the telephone to be able to exchange notes with the rest of the Eastenders club (believe me, there are lots of us). Last Sunday was my birthday, and the best part of it was when another sister came round for a marathon celebration Eastenders binge with a freezer-bag full of Kola Rola and Fruti Blu ice-lollies and a giant bag of crisps. Dinner out? Forget it. The thing about getting older is that you’re allowed to do what you want.

And then it struck me what’s wrong with Maltese soap operas. They’re made up of people who talk and behave like they belong in a Maltese version of Eastenders, but they’re huffing and puffing and pretending to be posh – but getting it all wrong, so when real tal-pepe people watch, they think it’s rubbish because it really is. What we need to set those screens on fire is a Maltese Eastenders, but it won’t happen because when people act here, they want to pretend they’re something they’re not. They want to swan about in a massive villa with marble terraces and talk with imaginary plums in their mouths. What a pity. The reason why Tista Tkun Int is so popular is because it’s jam-packed with the real-life Eastenders stories of real-life Eastenders people. Some clever production house might as well take the idea and run with it.