The night before last I watched Xarabank’s special edition on 50 years of Maltese television. One of the most disturbing elements of this experience was the dawning realisation that I remembered most of them, my parents having been pioneers of the then avant-garde practice of using the television as an excellent form of distraction for a nursery full of rowdy children. Back then, television began, as I recall (and I might recall incorrectly) at around 6pm and ended, bossily, at what might be considered a suitable bedtime for adults.

In between, Malta Television broadcast a test card, which to my delight has been used now as the design for the stairwell window at the freshly revamped PBS building. I have fond memories of that test card. My parents, their patience tested to the limit by four children under six years old, used to park us in front of it around an hour before proper transmission began, with a pile of comics and a container load of Lego bricks, and tell us convincingly that the hot cartoon of the moment would be on “soon”.

This was the television-watching version of “Stop fighting and complaining! We’ll soon arrive,” which was invariably followed by another 40 minutes in traffic.

Indeed, my mental image of Mary Grech, doyenne of the screen that tended to be hidden behind a roll-out, roll-in wooden concertina shutter, is not how she appeared as she sat, snowy-haired and perennially elegant with perfect posture, beside Joe Azzopardi last Friday night, but as she was in those brief vignettes projected onto the facade of the television building in Guardamangia. Mary Grech was the voice of calm and order in a sea of cartoons and news bulletins, back in the days of continuity announcers, or ‘presenters’ as they were called then.

Like me, you might almost have forgotten what continuity announcers were, or might never have known – even though BBC Entertainment and many of the other channels cabled in to our homes have the faceless, voiceover variety which tells us which show is coming up next. Back in the days of The Banana Splits, Sesame Street and The Monkees, we got the composed face of Mary Grech, and I imagine others too, though I can’t remember them, telling us which programme had just ended and which one was about to begin. It seems a charming concept now, rooted in an era when television was still seen as the broadcast child of the stage performance.

Removed from its usual time-polished format, Xarabank dragged on and lacked oomph and verve, but that might be because far too many of the guests, despite their long history in television, failed to sparkle and amuse. At any rate, we could have done with far less of the talking heads on chairs and far more of those fascinating clips from the state television archives, some of which were informative and others hysterically funny.

I particularly loved the advertisement for Philippine Airways. A young woman stands in the wind on the viewing terrace at Luqa airport, eyebrows plucked to oblivion, as an interviewer sticks a vast microphone into her face. I’ll translate from Maltese. “Who are you waiting for?” “I am waiting for my fiancé.” “How long has your fiancé been abroad?” “He has been away for about two years.” “Why didn’t you go and visit him yourself?” “Visit him myself? You need so much money to do that.” “Ah, but not with Philippine Airways!”

I could have watched hours of the news footage from the last 50 years. I loved, loved, loved the water skiers in Grand Harbour, each holding up a letter to make the word INDEPENDENCE – they had a glamour that Malta lost so tragically in the awful Labour years and never regained. But sadly, all we got were random clips of official events linked to Malta gaining independence, Malta becoming a republic and that fictitious Jum Il-Helsien, which was just the day Britain’s contract on its military base ran out after Mintoff failed to persuade the British government to renew it (he then sold this story of massive failure, which was politically and financially catastrophic, the dockyard remaining a hundreds-of-millions-sucking black hole for the next four decades, as a story of success).

Of course, PBS having long since entered the realm where political correctness and the careful avoidance of offence to Laburisti has won the day over factual representation of events from our much-troubled Mintoffian past, this footage of Jum Il-Helsien did not show Muammar Gaddafi as the sole head of state who accepted Mintoff’s invitation to that farcical ceremony, which marked the start of Malta’s survival as a vassal state of Libya.

Perhaps the real reason Xarabank was so flat is that it was constrained to be the Stalinist version of 50 years of Maltese television. There was absolutely no mention of the crucial 16 years in which state television was used, to quote the words of a government minister of the time, as an instrument to create a new Socialist generation.

What it did, of course, was create the most unbelievably crass and ignorant generation who could be reliably depended upon to vote Labour because they knew no better (which is not the same thing as inculcating socialist sensibilities). Joe Grima, Karmenu Vella, Mintoff, Jason Micallef’s friend Ronnie Pellegrini and the rest of the disgraceful lot did not do this by means of the Sesame Street, Big Blue Marble and Scooby-Doo we watched, but through the bits in between. Of course, though it was by far the most significant (and at 16 years, by far the longest) chapter in the history of Maltese television, we had no mention of it last Friday.

Instead, we had the first colour broadcast in 1981, without the contextual information that practically nobody could watch it back then because there was a monopoly on colour television sets, they cost the equivalent of 15 weeks’ wages, and you had to get on a waiting-list or obtain a recommendation from Karmenu Vella (currently still writing Joseph Muscat’s electoral programme) to get one. Back then in 1981, our entire tal-pepe street watched the ill-fated wedding of Diana Spencer to the Prince of Wales on the diplomatically-immune colour TV of our German diplomat next-door neighbours. Nobody else had one, and we were supposed to be the much-despised sinjuri.

To move up the waiting list you also had to bribe people, though I didn’t expect Xarabank to say that. However, my view is that if you are not going to document the facts, it’s best to avoid the show altogether, because the Chinese-style avoidance of awkward facts that might offend the incoming government is just not acceptable in a democracy.

One of the old adverts we were shown was telling in its own way, but only to those of us who actually remember the joys of shopping for food in the Golden Years of Labour. Eileen Montesin conducted a promotional interview with the owner of a mini-market in the early 1980s. As she quizzed him about his amazing service, the camera moved over the shelves: rows and rows of the same six or seven Communist-export tin cans full of revolting mediocre stuff from which we would somehow have to create edible meals.

Then, for some reason, PBS boss Anton Attard gave the Labour Party’s in-house impresario Ray Azzopardi a tour, like the Queen, of the redecorated television building. You could see the wheels turning in Azzopardi’s head: “I’m going to be the boss of this next March.” I was also left with the strange sensation that this was in fact the capacity in which he was being shown around – as the imminent new boss. Maybe they did it to irritate Jason Micallef, who desperately wants to be in charge after heading up Super One so beautifully these past few years.

Either way, it’s kind of depressing to see Azzopardi, who I remember so well from that absolutely ghastly 1980s programm ghaz-zghazagh, Arzella, with his then already dyed (by his own admission) and blow-dried bouffant hairdo, marching again around the state television premises as though he’s going to be pushing lots of buttons pretty soon.

 

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