No more Antonioni: how Berlusconi turned entertainment into politics
Silvio Berlusconi was, in more ways than one, the televisual prophet of the neoliberal age. Though he officially entered politics only in 1994, his cultural hegemony began long before. From the early 80s, Berlusconi ruled Italy by means of entertainment, managing political life the same way he did his media conglomerates, translating Reaganite hedonism into Italian. His private TV channels changed the tastes of Italian audiences by bringing the action-filled dreams of American capitalism into their living rooms.
The fuel that propelled the early days of Berlusconi’s Mediaset empire was cinema, mostly American cinema. The budget for original content was limited, so pay TV filled programming schedules with films. Films that, back then, one could not see on other channels. For more than two decades, Mediaset successfully challenged the state television monopoly, thereby paving the way for the privatisation of everyday life. With the expediency of a pirate, he steered the nation away from the cinema of Fellini and Antonioni, towards the inexorable Americanisation of mass culture.
Berlusconi went on to bring the colours and intoxicating freedom of consumer choice to wider Italian TV culture. Previously Italians could only choose from three public TV channels. RAI, the state broadcaster, hired the likes of Umberto Eco and avant garde composer Luciano Berio, while Berlusconi pied-pipered viewers with scantily clad women, quizshows and generous amounts of advertising. In 1981 Mediaset (then still called Fininvest) acquired the CBS soap opera Dallas and turned it into an audience favourite. Another golden acquisition was that of the TV host Mike Bongiorno, who Berlusconi bought from RAI in 1979. Born in the US to parents of Italian descent, Bongiorno became famous in the early days of Italian television for adapting popular American formats such as The $64,000
Question, Jeopardy and, after he started working for Berlusconi, The Wheel of Fortune.
Crucial to Berlusconi’s mass-media ascendancy was the figure of Antonio Ricci, a TV writer and showrunner who, in the words of Variety, “with his penchant for comedy and variety, changed the face of Italian television”. State television programming up to then had appealed to a wide, inter-generational audience, Ricci’s shows attracted younger spectators. His series – such as Drive In, Lupo Solitario and Striscia la Notizia – had a new rhythm: catchier, funnier and flashier, allowing for more commercial breaks whose tones and aesthetics seamlessly blended into his programmes.
A post-ideological Italy enchanted by wealth, notoriety and status-seeking ambitions was immortalised in and moulded by Mediaset’s programmes. It might not have been a pretty sight, but it was a very popular one. Anticipating the Netflix model, Berlusconi then started producing films to fill his own TV channels with. In the early 90s he entered a partnership with Vittorio Cecchi Gori and went on to produce films by Lucio Fulci, Bernardo Bertolucci, Ettore Scola, Giuseppe Tornatore and Franco Zeffirelli.
Faced with the very concrete risk of ending up in jail due to his not-alwaystransparent business conduct, Berlusconi entered politics to seek parliamentary immunity. It worked. And his previous experience in entertainment proved vital: he surfed the rotten waters of Italian politics and brought neo-fascists out of the sewers and into parliament for the first time since the second world war. Now these same neofascists are ruling the country after being democratically elected. Berlusconi’s last show was his own state funeral which Italians were able to watch, needless to say, on television.