Piero Chiambretti’s childishness. It was inevitable that he would end up like this, engaged in babbling on television, obsessed with “baby talk”, that little voice that adults use to address children. Since Chiambretti no longer has people like Bruno Voglino or Romano Frassa or Gianni Boncompagni behind him he has become a child again (I’m talking about television, not people): he has begun to lose his identity, to believe he is something else from himself, to take care of things foreign to him, to make the wrong plans. Last stop: “The TV of 100 and one”, a small blockbuster of “little fans” that bypasses midnight (Channel 5). It’s an over-constructed show in which children act like children (the stereotype of children on TV), in a spiral of emotional blackmail. The older society gets, the more TV entrusts children with the task of depicting a lost world, imagined but still capable of arousing tenderness.
The history of Italian TV is full of bad programs which have children as protagonists (from “Little fans” to “I leave you a song”, from “Who framed Peter Pan” to “Genius”, from “Shut up everyone! They talk” to “Bravo, Bravissimo” but at least Mike Bongiorno was not at all condescending). Just as in the past many toys rigorously prefigured the universe of adult functions, they delighted in being “reduced formats” of real objects, so children who end up on TV don’t exercise their imagination but mimic a universe that doesn’t belong to them. Sorry for Chiambretti. How far away are the times of “Congratulations for the broadcast” or “The Postman”! At one point he stopped “growing” professionally, he always began to follow the same plan: to build a sumptuous frame for a fair booth. Now, to the “admirable differences” he has replaced the children, obtaining the role of new Wizard Zurlì.
