“The Sweeney” was a captivating British television series that presented police drama without the sickening, non-stop, detailed autopsy scenes of today’s American TV fodder. It was produced in the 1970s and gained huge popularity both in the UK and all over the English-speaking world of ex-colonies buying stuff from the old, imperial ‘mother country’.

At the time, no doubt, it was also a massive challenge to the BBC, having been shot by Thames Television for transmission on ITV, then its one and only major rival. I am sure they would have preferred to have been the outlet for such a highly successful production.

What is also certain, however, is that the BBC then would not have accepted the incredibly prejudiced and biased package that the BBC of today’s own ‘Sweeney’, presented in yet another massive display of journalistic faux pas. One can only attribute John Sweeney’s pitiful attitude in the recent feature about Malta to the reality of Malta’s plummeting media credibility levels, particularly since Donald Trump’s election victory in the US, which was a considerable slap in the face to renowned institutional news organisations everywhere in the world. And the story continues.

Was Sweeney’s professional faux pas unintentional, and so simply rendered awkward and uncomfortable, or was it the result of yet another attempt at messing about with the decaying bones of a blatant non-story – the likes of which occur in their hundreds everyday in both the UK and the rest of the world, alas, and are overlooked by the same media? Ironically, it continues to perpetrate this opaque perception of ours that we are, after all, the centre of the universe.

It is difficult to decide which, simply because, like many others who regularly follow the international media, I have always admired John Sweeney and thought of him as a gifted professional and a stickler for the truth. Not this time, though. Has the 21st century credibility bug got to him as well? He must have felt pretty uneasy at facing the Prime Minister of an insignificant but peaceful, successful little island, ready with the answers and serenely willing to reiterate his commitment to resigning should even a whiff of truth come out of The Sweeney’s all too predictable package of allegations, UK-baked from sour local political ingredients.

In his heart of hearts he must have realised he was being taken for a ride by those whose purposes he served, intentionally or unintentionally, when he should have been the driver as has, after all, always been his characteristic style. But then, we are almost past the second decade of the new millennium when the media has sadly come to mean more mock-up and plaster, and not the 1970s, when ‘detectives’ depended on their own instincts and not those of others.

 

 

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Freudian Slip?

As with the big Media, there also seems to be this impression that politicians from big nations feel it their duty to come over to weigh us, gauge us, pat us and judge us - A  poor little people with a penchant for achievements of historical magnitude. From the Pheonicians and the Romans with their purple colours and the honey, and the Great Siege of 1565 to the two World Wars, we have always been there to steal some limelight in the nick of time, often punching well above our weight.

In the post-war era, the flow of these do-gooders has hardly flickered. We’ve had cardinals and admirals lecturing us about ‘Reds under the beds’ in the 1960s, and German and Italian politicians from the Right in the 1970s and 1880s (remember Flaminio Piccoli, the Austrian-born Italian politician, and the German Kai-Uwe von Hassel, pretty much in the spirit of the Axis Powers, exchanging salvos with Dom Mintoff?), all of them having to make the sacrifice of descending on these placid islands with their elaborate appeals to save not just our tiny archipelago, but Europe and beyond. Again, it made us feel as if we are turning pointedly at the core of this ever-expanding universe. With accession to the European Union, of course, the list has grown a hundredfold.

One of the more obsessed in recent months has been the German MEP and EPP frontliner Manfred Weber, precisely from the country where the extreme, neo-Nazi Right has been making the most electoral gains – and certainly a threat to any country’s rule of law, as the Third Reich era amply showed. At a CSU conference the other day, he spoke about the need for a “final solution” to the immigration crisis facing Europe. Ouch! Was this a Freudian slip? A slip of the tongue in which a word or phrase that the speaker was subconsciously thinking about is substituted for the one that he or she meant to say?

When a German talks about a ‘final solution’, in whatever context, go and quickly hide your sons and daughters, all of you Jews and others of a semetic or even darker complexion. As for the rule of law, Herr Weber would do well to have a look at a recent article in l’Espresso entitled: La ’ndrangheta che fa affari in Germania ma l’Europa non lo vuole sapere.

 

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What’s in a name?

A cute little story with a harmless little piece of media manipulation took place during the festive season when the name of a young man from Atlanta was changed from ‘Hunter Fisher’ to that of author Benjamin Holcomb in an interview on American provincial television. Why? Because his real name was not considered to be ‘believable’. Fuelled by the entire fake news concept of these last few years, Fisher’s tweet on social media went viral.

While saying he was not offended by the channel changing his name in the assumption that it could not be his real one, Fisher revealed that his mother – certainly blessed with a good sense of humour – originally wanted to name him ‘Hunter Trapper Fisher’. FKNK must love it.

I have a weakness for this play with names. Like most Charleses of my generation, at birth I was named ‘Carmel’. Infallibly, my teachers would instinctively add the Italian embellishment of an ‘o’ at the end of it. Many of my old friends know me in the Maltese derivative of ‘Ċali’, but there have always been instances of the few preferring the warmer versions of Karmenu and Nenu.

The greatest laugh I ever had, however, was in Japan several years ago during a broadcast management seminar. Igarashi, our group leader, seemed to have a problem distinguishing between my passport name and my everyday name because I had been officially admitted to the seminar under ‘Carmel sive (Latin for ‘either or’) Charles’. Having consulted her precious pink file to check it out, she suddenly started addressing – and introducing – me as ‘Mr Sive’.