theartsdesk in Milan: Death of a Quiz Show Host

“Guarda, è come se fosse morta la regina Elisabetta, sai?” I didn’t really need the comparison with the hypothetical demise of our own beloved monarch to be spelled out for me by my partner, a somewhat reserved professor of Paediatric Neurology at one of Rome’s leading hospitals, in order to drive home the deep shock engendered by the sudden death of Italy’s best-loved veteran TV compère on the collective psyche of a nation.

True to his quietly heroic and endlessly energetic persona, Mike Bongiorno did not die what our Anglo-Saxon warrior forebears used to call a “cow’s death” – ie in bed, or on the sofa, leafing through a glossy magazine or pottering around the house in velveteen leisurewear. At the age of 85, he was snatched away by the Big Fat Gods of Classical Mediterranean Television to their own brightly lit version of Valhalla whilst on his way out of his hotel in Monte Carlo for a jog with his personal trainer.

The effect was immediate and deeply felt. There are relatively few figures in the country around whose reputation or symbolic value the entire nation can gather as one, and Mike – his surname was always somewhat superfluous – was one of whom all Italy could concur: we shall not see his like again. It was pretty much the end of an era.

With a career somewhat shadowing that of our own dear Queen, he had served in World War Two and then in 1953 began a career both distinguished and modest in tone, which was to be unbroken until his death earlier this month. Television schedules on all of Italy’s seven national generalist channels were torn up for several days to commemorate his passing, both national and regional newspapers produced multi-page supplements. Even the sober Milan-based Corriere della Sera dedicated its first nine pages on 9 September to the event of the year, while numerous biographies were hurriedly updated and rushed onto the bookstands.

Displaying his customary shrewd eye for the popular mood, Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi immediately called the protocol office of the Quirinal Palace in Rome, in order to accord the fallen hero a state funeral. Although entirely lacking in canny populism, President Giorgio Napolitano swiftly consented, and so three days later Milan’s massive Gothic cathedral was packed with 5,000 mourners, including a who’s who of Italian television led by Berlusconi himself, whilst double that number were pressed into the Piazza del Duomo outside.

In Britain, we think of our most distinguished TV presenters commentating on state funerals, certainly not receiving them. Mike Bongiorno spent his long career presenting nothing more lofty than quiz shows. Lascia o Raddoppia? , the Italianised version of The $64,000 Question which he hosted from 1955 to 1959, was the most famous, gaining him the inevitable and enduring soubriquet “Il Re del Quiz”. And unlike the velvety smoothness of a Dimbleby’s diction, or the epigrammatic terseness of a Walter Cronkite, he frequently fluffed his lines and on occasions made gaffes – or howlers – which would have ended the career of a lesser man.

He once read out from a cue card the name of Pope Pius X as “Pio Ex”, pronouncing the X as if the late 19th-century pontiff was all but related to Black Power leader Malcolm X. And if that wasn't shocking enough, to a female contestant on Lascia o Raddoppia? who had lost her aggregate score by fluffing a question about a bird, he said, “Signora, mi è caduta proprio sull’uccello.” This was understood by the millions of Italians watching religiously – and we are talking about the post-austerity years of the late 1950s, when public morals were rigorously upheld in every way – to mean, “Signora, you have just fallen on my cock."

Like his carefully preserved physical appearance (the blow-dried bouffant gingerish hair remained unchanged to the end), his clunky normalness, deliberate and somewhat dull verbal delivery, along with an apparent lack of any intellectual curiosity, were all carefully nurtured throughout his long career, and never seemed to waver at all. In 1963 Umberto Eco dedicated an incautiously snobbish essay entitled “La fenomenologia di Mike Bongiorno” to analysing the secret of Mike’s extraordinary success: namely, by appearing a duller and less intelligent man than practically any of his viewers, he created a subliminal “feel-good factor” amongst his followers, to the extent that they would all feel cleverer and more verbally gifted than the best paid TV star in the land. Like so many of Eco’s theories, this was not only patronising but also patent nonsense, although it usefully displayed in filigree the serious functional issues that left-wing intellectuals and politicians have had since the war in understanding what makes “ordinary” Italians tick.

Much of Italy’s television output since the creation of commercial television in the mid-1970s has appeared not only lurid but hysterical and overstated, consisting of presenters and even members of the public shouting and yelling at each other. In recent years this tendency has found a new legitimacy with the spread of the reality television genre, of which Grande Fratello (the Italian Big Brother) has been a shining example.

Standing on the sets of his brightly lit, garishly furnished quiz shows – some of which descended over the years from Saturday evening must-see viewing to daytime space-fillers - Mike Bongiorno projected an image of effortless understated authority, his simple humanity transcending the gigantic Wheel of Fortune in La Ruota della Fortuna or the stacked-up piles of prizes in the studio like that of a medieval Catholic saint on an altarpiece, surrounded by the instruments of his physical torment.

Although he lacked the smooth delivery or the roguish irony of Britain’s Favourite Living Irishman, Mike’s carefully modulated blandness was as effective a counterpoint to the mounds of goodies and scantily clothed lovelies around him as any of Terry Wogan’s guerrilla commentaries on the Eurovision Song Contest. But it was all achieved without a single (intentional) wisecrack.

Mike’s Warholian genius for fascinating, entrancing dullness was something that long eluded Italy’s largely left-wing cultural elite. It certainly didn't escape the attention of slash-and-burn wannabe media mogul Silvio Berlusconi, who spent the mid-1970s transforming his mysteriously successful property empire into an equally successful television one. Mike Bongiorno was top of his shopping list, and in 1979 was snatched away from state broadcaster RAI to front Berlusconi’s then upstart channel TeleMilano (later to become his flagship Canale 5 channel). So began a close personal and business relationship which was to define Italian popular television over the last 30 years.

One of the great partnerships of modern Italy was created (pictured right). Was it Rodgers and Hammerstein, Lennon and McCartney or Jekyll and Hyde? While Berlusconi’s overbearing loquacity and obsessive self-promotiton (not to mention, questionable political agenda) were at odds with Bongiorno’s modest and understated manner, in almost every other way the two men were as if joined at the hip, each one interpreting another aspect of the same mission: how to appeal to the less rarefied instincts of Italy’s fast-maturing consumer middle and lower class, with particular attention dedicated to women, above all those of a certain age, stuck mostly at home doing the housework, with the telly on in the background.

For over a decade, Mike talked them into buying the consumer products which his Berlusconi-owned Mediaset quiz shows peddled incessantly between spins of the wheel, or throws of the dice, while from 1993 onwards Silvio has been busy appealing to that same demographic, inveigling “le mamme, le nonne, le zie d’Italia” (Italy's mothers, grandmothers and aunts) into buying into his political projects. What a double act: many Italian voters who were instinctively uneasy about shouty show-off Silvio’s grab for political power were subliminally persuaded of his “alrightness” through the soothing ministrations of his slightly clunky on-screen alter ego Mike.

The Italian Left didn’t start to get the diabolical joint design behind their double act until way after time. Wrapping himself in Mike’s comfortingly anodyne safety blanket, Silvio was able to reverse his media empire into Italy’s electoral structure and create an almost seamless whole. Just like Mike and Silvio, the two seperate entities have sort of been fused into one indistinguishable mass.

But the collapse of Communism and its attendant cultural certainties, and the consequent rise of postmodernism and cultural relativism from the late 1980s, made it increasingly difficult for an Umberto Eco or for the various re-booted centre-left parties to deride a figure as central to the Italian masses as Mike, or the carefully honed commercial television culture of which he had become the figurehead.

Mike is a truly national icon now, and unsurprisingly not a few wags have revived the populist slogan that emerged in Piazza San Pietro in the days following Pope John Paul II’s death. “Santo subito!" Make him a saint, before the next ad break!