It came like a lightning bolt in a Summer day: Xarabank is no more, its creator informed us.
A rainstorm ensued – those who loathed the programme against those now afraid what's going to happen and which government stooge will get that prime slot.
Ironically, apart from Peppi Azzopardi's self praise in the original Facebook announcement, no one, as far as I can tell, has come out to praise the programme and regret the decision to stop it.
The decision to stop the programme marks the end of an epoch.
To analyse its beginning, one must go back to Iz-zghazagh tan-numri in the mid-1980s, when Malta was still under a Socialist administration which had lost the 1981 election but persisted in staying in power.
Regime change was coming nevertheless and the activities of the Zghazagh tan-Numri became bolder and more imaginative with Peppi (at that time still plain Joe) Azzopardi one of the prime movers.
With regime change in 1987, broadcasting as we knew it then with just one national broadcaster was liberalised (ending up in the strange and nowhere else seen scenario of political parties owning media).
Azzopardi proposed and PBS accepted, to host a weekly current affairs programme.
Xarabank was thus born and stayed alive and with top ratings from 1997 till today.
Viewers have seen Peppi getting fatter and fatter while he surrounded himself with close aides and family members.
Along with others I never cared for his way of interviewing people, interrupting them all the time and not allowing them to formulate their replies.
Knowing how fickle Maltese politics tend to be, it was always a wonder how the programme survived so many regime changes until today. Considered to be a Nationalist by the vast majority of Labour supporters, he carefully trimmed his sails and sailed through all the various crises in national life.
At the end, he became a national institution until people began to think he was eternal - and that in the national broadcaster. And they wondered what was keeping him on top.
Besides being a national institution in himself, he also set up a parallel company to PBS with its own studio, crew and staff. In time, people came and people left.
His programme became stale and hackneyed, predictable and focused on advertising revenue.
If one compares, for instance, PBS with foreign programmes there is a lightness in the latter you will not find in Xarabank. Plus the audience at his live shows was mostly the same sorry crowd (unless it was a political one which tended to get supporters bused in).
In other words, it ran beyond its time. It will not be missed not even if this government were to get a hack to replace him.
To all those today shedding crocodile tears, I say: do not make Xarabank the last bastion of free speech because it wasn’t.
Only on one or two subjects – migrants and prisoners – Peppi struck in the face of public opinion and, without necessarily agreeing completely with him, I praise his dogged stand. I would like to think he was not sidelined because of these stands.
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