Newsagent's life

I offer you a theatrical preview — with a completely exclusive flavor — that should also be released soon as a narrative text.

There is an actor at the center of the scene and there is a voiceover asking questions. What could be a long monologue turns out to be an interview, where the role of the interviewee and the interviewer are exchanged. In fact, the one who usually has always asked questions by habit, by profession, by competence, is the one who suffers a barrage of questions: the writer, journalist and television author Aldo Dalla Vecchia.

Aldo talks about his youth as a son of an industrialist. He has always loved the written word more than his father’s company. From an early age he had the desire to become a journalist. Leaving Chiampo, a small town in the Vicenza area, for Milan — a city with which he will fall in love to the point of crying with joy when he returns after a “bad” stay in Rome — Aldo begins a process made up of telephone calls to all the newspapers Editors. He arms himself with tokens, occupies a phone booth and calls the “esteemed editorial staff”. Eventually someone answers. From “Epoca” to “Sorrisi e Canzoni TV”, Aldo makes his way into the most important newspapers, where he deals with costume and gossip, music, entertainment, art.

But Aldo also belongs to that generation that experienced the transition from state to commercial TV. From a plastered, didactic, moralistic television, he finds himself catapulted into a phantasmagoric and yuppi broadcaster. It is the new TV of the “biscione”, that of the legendary eighties, of sequins, with all the chiaroscuro of the case.

Aldo is welcomed into Mediaset and perhaps lives its most innovative and brilliant period, that of the beginnings, of the “Drive in”, of the “Milano da bere”. He signs a program that remains in the history of television “Target”, participates in “Verissimo”, “Il Bivio” and “Giallo Uno”.

The whole monologue is a crackling re-enactment of many years of television and a thousand encounters, from those with myths like Mike Bongiorno, to those with colorful and histrionic characters like his friend Malgioglio, Platinette, Moira Orfei, the sensual Alba Parietti of the times of the glorious “stool”. All the big names flow before our eyes: Raffaella Carrà, Mino Reitano, the Poohs, Rita Pavone, Miguel Bosè, Amanda Lear. The piece is all a roundup of showgirls, of mentioned characters, such as Nina Moric and Fabrizio Corona, but also of important professional contacts, of masters of journalism and television such as Maurizio Costanzo.

The tone is relaxed, ironic, easy but able to reconstruct from the inside a world that we all know only superficially, without realizing the work behind it, even the physical effort. Let’s imagine the commitment, the stalking waiting for the VIP on duty, the difficulty of obtaining the exclusivity of an interview, the painstaking work that is the basis of a program, the dedication and passion of those who do not know Sundays or holidays of the sort

The book ranges through the entire history of television, from “Pippi Longstocking” to “The House in the Prairie”, from “Michele Strogoff” to “Drive In”, from “Orzoway” to “GF” — an authentic watershed between what preceded it and the great season of reality TV — and, again, from generalist TV to digital channels.

The text opens in two directions: on the one hand the essay study, on the other the memory. The two components merge into one, so that the excursus through the history of television is drawn on the thread of an overbearing personal nostalgia.

“The end of the Seventies marked for us little viewers an epochal transition and an absolute but beneficial shock, with the arrival of color programs and the birth of private TVs, one above all Telemilano 58, the future Channel 5 where I found many of the my favorites. The first was Mike; after him, Loretta Goggi, Sandra Mondaini and Raimondo Vianello, Corrado arrived: all refugees from Rai."