Minoli: “Adani is shouting nonsense; they’re kicking Buttafuoco out and bringing in a minister’s girlfriend”

“The other evening, Daniele Adani didn’t provide commentary during the Argentina v England semi-final. He shouted out a rambling rap over a football match. And the ironic thing is that they let him get away with it, in the very same organisation where, in the upcoming radio schedules, they’re silencing a writer, Pietrangelo Buttafuoco, on political orders, and may well replace him with a young lady who’s claimed to be in a relationship with the Home Secretary. Look, it all ties in. It’s the same Rai, you see? The one that shouts and the one that silences, the one that even raps its programme schedules. There’s a single guiding principle.” Ah, and what might that be? “No principle at all.” Giovanni Minoli laughs and says this over the phone, without preamble, like someone who’s already written the verdict and is merely reading it out with irony. To be precise, the other evening on Rai 1, in the 86th minute, when Argentina equalised, Adani, a former footballer and commentator, wraps himself up in his words as if he were wrapping himself in a parcel, starts shouting and brings Einstein into it, then realises that Einstein isn’t enough and brings God into it, then realises that even God isn’t enough and brings Dios into it, who is superior to God because at least Dios has won a World Cup.

All this in a sort of hybrid language that might well have appealed to Dario Fo and his ‘grammelot’. “The first rap featuring a theological escalation ever broadcast live on Rai 1,” says Minoli. “But the real ‘patchwork’ isn’t in Adani’s voice as he tries to imitate Brazilian radio commentators. It lies in the fact that that voice comes from a broadcaster that ‘patches together’ everything in the same way: the schedules, the morning shows, the directors, using exactly the same method – which is, in fact, no method at all.” Just like when they entrusted the commentary for the Olympics to Paolo Petrecca. Dario Fo’s ‘grammelot’, precisely, but without the genius behind it. “I’m not saying we should go back to Niccolò Carosio – though that would be marvellous. But at the very least we should go back to hearing things that make sense. I just turn the volume down now.” An example of this ‘patchwork’ approach, outside the football pitch? “Rai’s programming schedule isn’t a concept, it’s a drawer. They shove whatever comes to hand into it, without asking whether it all fits together. And when something gets in the way, they take it out – not because it doesn’t work, but because the person holding the keys to the drawer at that moment has stopped liking it. What’s new? What’s been invented? Sanremo? Where’s the public service? Who knows.”

Does the Buttafuoco case fit this pattern? “It’s a textbook example. They’ve cut ten minutes a day, at 7 am, from a right-wing writer’s programme simply because he’s a free-thinking individual. They’re taking it away from him because, in another arena – that of the Biennale – the same man made a choice that displeased someone in government. If they think that programme was bad, they should say so. But they can’t just say that that time slot will be ‘allocated to something else’.” Amid the same wave of cuts, other programmes remain untouched. “For reasons that have little to do with the quality of the programme.” And what does Adani have to do with it? “If a company really cared about its product, it wouldn’t let a live World Cup semi-final, watched by millions of people, turn into a treatise on South American metaphysics. The fact that they allow it – indeed, that they call on him every time they need to fill an evening’s programming – shows that nobody cares any more about what happens on screen. But perhaps it’s so hot that, deep down, anything goes.”