TELEVISION IN ITALY

Press, Volume LXXXIX, Issue 27097, 21 July 1953, Page 13

TELEVISION IN ITALY

REGULAR SERVICES NEXT YEAR FOUR MAIN STUDIOS PLANNED (From a Reuter Correspondent.) ROMS. Italians will time in to their first regular television service on New Year’s Day 1954, five years after the first experiments in Turin. Engineers have promised that about 20,000,0u0 persons, from Turin in the north to Naples in the south, will be within receiving range. But they do not expect so many Italians to see the first programmes. Manufacturers are trying hard to produce a set within the means of the '‘average” Italian—who earns only 214,000 lire (about £123) a year. Imported sets from Britain and America would cost the “average” Italian his year’s wages. So the radiomakers are working out hire-purchase schemes to attract customers, knowing that they will have to compete with a climate which keeps Italians out of doors for their recreation eight months of the year, and a passion for spending on any form of motor-trans-port, from the ugliest motor-scooter to the sleekest racing car. Television began in Italy in 1949, with one transmitter at Turin, though it had been conceived long before the war. But Italian technicians in the television field have learnt much from the pioneers in the British Broadcasting Corporation and Radio Diffusion Francais since the war. A group of them went to London in 1952 to study British techniques of transmission, production and acting. There are three studios operating in Italy, one in Turin and two in Milan. A fourth is planned for Rome, where many people think that television aerials would be a blot on the landscape worse than the Vatican’s towering radio masts. The Rome studio will occupy a site of some three and a half acres to the west of the city by the autumn of this year. Italians fortunate enough to have access to a television set have been able to watch experimental programmes, mostly short American films made specially for this medium, for three years. State Has Sole Rights

The State-controlled Radio Audixione Italiana (R.A.1.) has sole rights to all television broadcasting in the Italian Peninsula. It need not fear competition from commercial television, being itself a sponsored organisation which carries many hours of advertising every week. But the pioneers of television in Italy are at the present worried about money. They had to borrow heavily to get their experiments under way, apd the capital expenditure on transmitters, studios, equipment, and training schemes has left them considerably in debt. They know that a period of profitable operation would get them out of debt—but they say it must come soon. Once programmes begin regularly, money will pour in from advertising sponsors. They want to make their productions educational as well as entertaining and althought they are going to. depend largely on advertisers, they say that producers will voluntarily censor their own programmes, to make sure that no questionable moral values find their way into Italian homes. Between September and December 1952 broadcasts totalled 222 hours from experimental stations in Milan and Turin. Short television films, either bought from American companies and dubbed, or made in Italy on the American model, accounted for 144 hours of transmission time. Another 25 hours were devoted to live drama, variety shows, reviews and music. Special programmes documenting important events came next with 20 hours. Repeats of foreign programmes got 17 hours, and news reels, 15 hours.

An analysis of this admittedly experimental stage in Italian television shows that so far the pioneers have made no original contribution to the new medium. Their time has been taken up with the enormous problem of getting the programmes safely to the viewer across mountain barriers, and through the screen of interference from cars and motor-cycles. The television mania which changed social institutions overnight in Britain and America, made neighbours more neighbourly, and bores more bearable in the drawing-room has not yet hit Italy.