In his urgent appeal against Rai, Ranucci attaches awards, viewing figures and audience approval ratings

The interim measures are a race against time. Here are the documents that have been quickly sacked off: the last document, number 51, is the report of a cardiology consultation on 9 September. Number 2 is the list of prizes won by Sigfrido Ranucci from 2000 to the present day. Between these two documents lie another forty-nine, and together they make up the urgent appeal filed yesterday at the Rome Labour Court. The correspondence we have read – oops, the draft – resembles a biography of Napoleon Bonaparte with, at the end, by way of an afterword, a lawsuit. And here is the glory: the Ilaria Alpi Award – won ‘no fewer than three times’ – the Maria Grazia Cutuli Award, the Mario Francese Award, the Giuseppe Fava Award, the Flaiano Award, the Giorgio La Pira Award, the Emanuela Loi Courage Award, the Father Pino Puglisi Award, the Joe Petrosino Award, the Eugenio Scalfari Award, the Montanelli Award, the Andrea Purgatori Prize, the Premiolino and the Garritta Prize for best Italian television presenter which – the defence is keen to point out – was awarded ‘after his removal’. Better than Bonaparte, then: an honour bestowed for martyrdom, a medal that celebrates not what you have done but what has been done to you. One can therefore picture Ranucci with all these small medals pinned to his chest, resembling a figure that Madame Tussauds’ wax museum might return. While it is true that, in order to determine whether the three positions offered by Rai are equivalent to the one lost at Report, the judge will have to weigh Ranucci’s professional track record and his qualities, However, it must be acknowledged that, within these forty pages, the defence has been presented with an enthusiasm that arguably exceeds what is strictly required for the trial, reaching the point where the lawyers state that within Rai ‘there are currently no positions of equal stature and prestige’ for a professional of Ranucci’s calibre. There he is; take a look at him. Here is the judge: a man who sits down convinced that he must determine whether three posts at Rai are professionally equivalent to presenting Report, and who instead finds himself faced with the story of a man recounted in the third person with such admiration that at times it feels as though one is reading De bello Gallico. Of the entire dossier filed yesterday with the Court, the most notable page is in fact the second, where it is announced that, for ‘the sake of brevity’, the text will be limited to a few ‘essential’ details. These few ‘essential details’ run until halfway through the fourth page – some 1,580 words. And after the awards, the medals, the telegrams, the formal commendations, the ‘Golden Mandarins’ and the ‘Bronze Antennas’, the text continues with a list of scoops and ‘internationally significant investigations among the most important of recent decades’. The document concludes with the all-time records: a 9 per cent prime-time audience share, 1.5 million viewers with peaks of 2.8 million, a further 800,000 for the Saturday repeat, ‘Qualitel’ ratings rising from 7.9 to 8.7 with first place held uninterrupted since 2017, 29 per cent of the 20–44 age group, 9 million unique users on social media... 

In the history of Article 700 of the Code of Civil Procedure – the provision under which a judge is asked to intervene as a matter of urgency because a right is about to be trampled upon – there has probably never been an appeal that began with a eulogy and continued with a popularity poll. Most figures in show business, when they finally write an autobiography, invariably recount a non-stop string of dazzling triumphs. TeleGatto included. The more astute ones sometimes throw in a tumble or two here and there, knowing full well that for the average reader – usually some poor wretch – nothing is more depressing than the story of a brilliant, lucky bloke who, thanks to a series of strokes of luck (and a bit of talent), has enjoyed fame, wealth and lovers galore.

In the forty-one-page biography of Ranucci, written for the judge, the ‘tumble’ is missing; Valter Lavitola is missing – the man who, from Rebibbia prison, admitted before the investigating magistrate that he had commissioned, out of friendship, the bomb that exploded on 16 October outside the villa in Pomezia. He is not mentioned even once throughout the document. He exists only as a circumlocution. Valter – or rather, Valterino – is ‘the ongoing investigation’, he is ‘the inquiries still under way’; a secondary administrative matter unfolding somewhere off-screen whilst a completely different drama is being played out on stage. Complete with a hand tucked inside his waistcoat. For He was, motionless as He was, on the Rai TV screen.