The role of women in commercial television
February 6, 2024 - 70 years later. Very little is missing from the new edition of the Italian Song Festival, for the fifth year in a row in the hands of Amadeus, and one of the first news, immediately after the announcement of the same artistic director, is that of co-deductors. Lorella Cuccarini, Giorgia and Teresa Mannino (together with Fiorello and Marco Mengoni) will be alongside Amadeus for the co-accounting of the program, in the general amazement of public opinion.
After the joy in seeing three female faces so loved by the Italian public, the first question that arises is: will a woman ever play the most important role that you can play in this event? And no, we are not talking about the conduction, because for that it is enough to go back ("only") to 2010, when Antonella Clerici Calcified the Ariston stage. Let's talk about the artistic direction, which was curated by Gianmarco Mazzi that year. Here is the problem, never, and we never repeat, the artistic direction of Sanremo was left in the hands of a woman.
"Men direct, women kick the stage"
Fanpage writes in an article published on January 17, 2020, a few days after the first appearance of Amadeus in the guise of the role so coveted.
And just that day we want to name, because we cannot forget the slide made by the same conductor in that fateful press conference. He is a character who makes himself love Amadeus, this is true, also because we see more during our family dinners than our family members. That sentence, however, we can take it as a cavalry in a role that is now stereotyped and bound for the woman in Italian television.
“It was a bet. I chose it because, in addition to being beautiful, it is capable of being close to a great man staying a step back "
Francesca Sofia Novello, the woman whose talent is to be beautiful (and we are talking about talent to remember that very talked about on the help that beauty gives the woman to work on television) and above all to be able to stay back respect to a great man (Valentino Rossi). "Well is a model of lingerie, what do you want me to know how to do" could think and write the first keyboard lion on duty, bringing his unquestionable and fundamental judgment under a random post.
The real problem, however, lies in the fact that after all it is not even his fault if the thought is so antiquated. It is above all the fault of Italian television, that television that begins to make its way when the first valleys give way to the "fast food girls" of "Drive in", or to the "Girls Cin Cin" of "Big Shot" up to the "Girls Crocodè "by Renzo Arbore and Nino Frassica of" Back all! ". The latter name wanted to be a strong satire against the figure of the woman who hovered in the Italian television of those years, bringing her to the street with a costume made of feathers to remember the hens.
The truth is that even if satire could work, public opinion thinks of the tissues, the valleys or even the letters as the women put on stage, with a single specific purpose, to attract attention to the program. Endy Campagnoli, who came to Maria Giovannini, was the figure of elegance in "Leave or Double" by Mike Bongiorno, but his role, immediately after the launch of the program, was to remain silent and deliver envelopes to the competitors. It passed time before the valleys were 'authorized to speak' during a broadcast.
We would therefore mean that one, among the many, problems relegated to the role of women in television, it is not so much that, the statistics of "the only 24 hours" carry percentages of female presence clearly minor in programs, fiction and work roles in Rai, but public opinion. The thought, rooted in our head due to a television of the purely male dawn, which was amazed at the victory of Nilla Pizzi in Sanremo 1951, and which left her scandalously in second place with the social criticism of "Papaveri and Duck". That thought What leads to say, "who knows what he will have done to be there, and we want to be kind because we know well that that" thing "is always externalized. The same that then brings Renzo Arbore to say that after all now women are better of men, during an interview for "Il Sole 24 Ore" in which he announced the advent of the new "back all! 30 and the ode", 30 years after the first programming and advent of the Crocodè girls.
We ask ourselves only because only now we realize that - perhaps and not always obviously - women are better than men.
In conclusion, with the hope that one day Sanremo has a woman in the role of artistic director, we wait for the next song festival, to criticize anything we will see, especially the female monologues, because yes, on this we are "very good", waiting for the Song by Fiorella Mannoia dedicated to the Mirabal sisters, the Dominican activists who in 1960 fought against the dictatorship of General Rafael Trujillo and who on November 25 were brutally killed, triggering the end of the dictatorship and the day against violence against women. We will meet and talk about it together, during the most awaited week of the year, a bit like our grandparents did in the garages, when the twins Kessler appeared for the first time with their legs discovered on "Canzonissima".
