Television To Read

Anyone who has a grandmother with an apron as armor and a ladle brandished as a sword, may have realized that the legendary “Artusi” has now been replaced in the kitchen by the books of “La prova del cuoco”, branded Eri Rai. Eri is the publishing brand with which Rai publishes books, magazines and multimedia products connected with its programming, churning out an average of fifty texts a year and defines itself as “The Rai to read”.

The beginning of Rai’s publishing activity dates back to January 1925, with the publication of the weekly Radio Timetable which reported the programs of Italian and European radio stations. In 1930, Radio Timetable with the EIAR became the Radiocorriere and in 1954 the Radiocorriere TV.

On September 15, 1949, the ERI Edizioni Radio Italiana company was formed and produced many series. They ranged from art to literature, from children’s books to language courses. Authors of the caliber of Emilio Cecchi, Carlo Emilio Gadda, Mario Praz, Folco Quilici, Natalino Sapegno, Giorgio Saviane, Giani Stuparich, Demetrio Volcic wrote for Eri. Specialized magazines were added to Radiocorriere, including L’Approdo letterario and L’approdo musica.

Since the 90s, Eri has published the books of the most important broadcasts and journalistic reports by Enzo Biagi, Bruno Vespa, Sergio Zavoli, Piero Angela, Antonio Caprarica. Since 1996 it has sold the publishing business to the parent company Rai.

In particular, I want to refer here to a period in which Rai still diligently fulfilled its task of public function, of mass literacy, of popular teaching.

In 1970 a book was released which was closely linked to a transmission that was very popular with adults but also with some curious and precocious children. The text was entitled “En Français”, it was a co-edition with Le Monnier, and was linked to the language course of the same name, based on a series of pedagogical films produced by the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs for the teaching of the language in the world.

It was a time when French still competed for primacy with English as an indispensable foreign language, although English began to have that alluring glimmer of modernity that so fascinated us, linked to swinging London, the Beatles and the Mary Quant miniskirts.

The book was divided into two volumes, reporting the dialogues of the micro films of the broadcast, small sketches set in traditional France. There was an interlude in which the lexical content of the text was illustrated and a subsequent part in which the words were inserted in a more modern context. Linguistic and grammatical exercises followed.

“Neither the broadcasts nor the book”, is explained in the introduction, “are intended to teach a grammar. The exercises themselves are not grammatical exercises, but tend, through repetition, to the “fixation” of the forms studied. “ (page 4)

Even with great caution, we can find here the core of modern language teaching, the one that is no longer based on the learning of grammar rules, but on immersion with the contextual use of linguistic formulas. In our opinion, this method, then taken to its extreme consequences, has created more harm than good, preventing the destructuring of sentences, the logical and grammatical analysis, the distinction between subject, predicate and complement, bringing learning back to a pre- rational raking of clichés, valid for those who really work in a context of full immersion (or for very young children with plastic brains) but not in the few, hasty hours granted by the ministry for teaching foreign languages.

The French course was aired in the early afternoon and united adults and children, the mothers followed it, dusting off school memories, the boys liked skits — between sheep and village fairs, between rural trattorias and cooking recipes — watching them they absorbed words and idioms, fascinated by ironic stories, by everyday life, by the little boy who turned the boxes of the picture with movable panels in the interim.

At the end of each lesson there was no shortage of pieces written in Italian (in order to be well understood by everyone) on contemporary France, aimed at attracting international tourism, perhaps denouncing what, in reality, was the real purpose of the even laudable initiative. But we don’t care about this, we like to remember the anxiety with which we awaited the start of the broadcast after lunch, the joy with which we took in our hands the big book connected to it — heavy white tome edged in yellow with the profile of France on the cover — the satisfaction when we managed to understand all the passages we found written after hearing them on television, reading them, pronouncing them correctly, remembering them, making them a personal heritage from which we would always draw on.

In short, the French course Eri Rai (Le Monnier) it belongs to that baggage of knowledge which, once acquired, no longer leaves us for life.