Ciao Fabio. Lei giusto. La televisione italiana no e migliore o piu difettosa (peggiore) della televisione in altri paesi. Mi piaccono i (gli?) game shows con Carlo Conti oppure Gerry Scotti, con o senza le velene.

Fabio reminded me that Italian TV is no better or worse than anywhere else but forgive me F, I have to share an Italian programming story with my readers.

The Wheel of Fortune is broadcast in just about every country I suspect. The Italian version used to be a day time show until the bigwigs decided to make it an early evening one targeting the demographic audience 18-35. The studio audience and contestants also generally fell into this age range. The host is Enrico Papi, a man who speaks at a million miles an hour. Italians are fond of saying he talks a lot but doesn´t say anything.

One contestant was Patrizia, a woman approaching 35, wild blonde hair, surgically enhanced anatomy, miniscule clothes which strained to cover her ample cleavage and pert bottom, who spoke with a baby voice. Whenever it was her turn to spin the wheel, Enrico, who had bought into her little act, would actually demonstrate the motion while saying very slowly ´gira la ruota´. She would then choose a letter ´la m di ma-ma; la l di lu-na´I´ve hyphenated the words to give you the idea of how slowly and breathily she pronounced them. Well, Patrizia had an opportunity to select prizes from the cave. She was given 30 seconds to pull whatever she could off the prize heap. She tottered off the contestants platform in her perilously high heels and Enrico explained what she had to do a couple of times because her attention wandered. ´Patrizia, look at me / Listen to me.´ Her 30 seconds began and the first prize she chose was a treadmill. Now most people would grab this piece of equipment by the handles and push it. Not our Patrizia. She bent over and grasped it by the rear wheels. It was here that the entire viewing public got to see all of her ass because she was wearing a thong. In this position, she dragged the machine away. Enrico was closest to her and I thought the way he grabbed his heart he was going to have a heart attack. He did the next best thing. He became part of the prize pool and put a price on himself but first he had to tell her to run and pick another prize because, having got the machine to the middle of the floor, she promptly sat on it!  She minced back to the prizes and chose a second thing but her time was up. She then complained about what she´d won saying she didn´t like them, hadn´t understood what she had to do and so wanted to choose other things. Enrico, her knight in shining armour, immediately leaped to her defense and agreed that yes, it´s not her fault she didn´t understand, she should choose something else. I can only imagine the people off camera shaking their heads vigorously and telling him to think with his head. I also wonder what his wife made of it all.

Game shows are a great way to learn the vocabulary of another language. Fortune and Who Wants To Be A Millionaire have been enormously helpful to me. I salute Italian television in all its glory. It has its good and bad programmes but it´s always entertaining.