Varietà during the first twenty years of Italian television broadcasting was a staple of the small screen. Light entertainment shows like Un, due, tre, Studio Uno and Milleluci attracted large numbers of viewers and acted as a platform for introducing and rendering familiar many faces who would become Italy's television stars in this period. These star figures reveal much about Italian society and culture of the period, thanks to their function as cultural symbols and conduits for ideas about gender, values and national identity (as Stephen Gundle argues in his work on cinema stars). But they also shed light on the accepted ways of behaving, dominant ideologies and the social and cultural status quo of the period in question. Given that Italian television was state-controlled until the mid-1970s, the intersection of the star figure with the medium of television and the political and cultural context of Italy in this period reveals the systems of cultural value and the wider established ideologies and ways of behaving at work in Italian society in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s.
To explore better this intersection and its significance, I immersed myself in the television broadcast context of the period by rewatching the varietà preserved in RAI's audiovisual archive, accessible at the Discoteca di Stato in Rome (now the Istituto Centrale per i Beni Sonori ed Audiovisivi). I also consulted a range of magazine publications of the period to explore how the programmes and stars of the moment were presented to audiences. Radiocorriere became an important source, as did magazines like Gente and La Domenica del Corriere. The COVID-19 restrictions that were still in place in Italy in 2021 limited my access to the audiovisual archive, but the programmes that I was able to view highlighted how star figures were used by television for political means in this period.
For example, the series Un, due, tre that aired between 1954 and 1959 showcased the film and theatre actors Ugo Tognazzi and Raimondo Vianello, making them even bigger names during the decade. The series played an important role on the Italian small screen in establishing the nature of light entertainment programming and shaping the audience's expectations regarding comedy performances on television. But because the series focused on and satirized the popular television programmes of the same period, it also functioned to educate viewers about television more broadly and so underlined the importance of the medium in the period. As the hosts of the series, Tognazzi and Vianello became the embodiment of these functions and acted as the vehicles through which the audience's entertainment and education might take place, echoing in fact the aim of Italian television in this period was to inform, educate and entertain (an aim borrowed from the BBC). Their status as stars was crucial to fulfilling this aim, and the way in which they addressed the audience and referred to programmes and events with which viewers were familiar served to create a community of Italian television viewers, an important political aim for the nascent medium in this period.
I am enormously grateful to the BSR for the opportunity to undertake this research in a stimulating and supportive environment. The conversations with scholars and artists that are an intrinsic part of life at the BSR helped to shape and reshape my thinking and I rediscovered the joy of being part of a scholarly community after the challenges of 2020. The foundational research that I was able to complete allowed me to be successful in securing a British Academy Small Research Grant that will enable me to complete my viewing of archived programmes in Rome and to produce a general-interest podcast on Italian television to mark the 70th anniversary in 2024.
