This is Ambra. She hosted a show about 5 years ago every afternoon. It was apparently a huge hit with the target audience: teen-aged girls. It was such a huge hit that it runs in syndication now at 5 AM every morning.
In all of my trips to Rome and Italy I’ve never once made any comments (negative or positive) about Italian pop culture.
But enough is enough. It’s time for a rant.
Italian TV is an odd assortment of sex, talk and cheap-o no-production-value variety shows. Kinda like US TV, except the sex is better, the talk is louder and the non-production values cheaper.
I was mesmerized every morning by what has to be the most unentertaining show I’ve ever seen. And from what I saw I was not the only one who was bored. And then there is Naples TV...
This is Ambra. She hosted a show about 5 years ago every afternoon. It was apparently a huge hit with the target audience: teen-aged girls. It was such a huge hit that it runs in syndication now at 5 AM every morning.
The show’s concept is pretty simple (and simple-minded); Ambra and her co-hostess Sabina (Introduced to chants of "Sabina! Sabina! Sabina!" by 4 dozen teenaged girls) introduce girls from the audience who come out and sing and dance to what were the hits of the day (I suppose). Then Sabina hosts a talk session about "important" topics .She starts the discussion and then hands the mic over to whoever wants to share. Or maybe she dispenses advice based on letters she’s received.
Then another few girls come out and "entertain" everyone and then Ambra takes some phone calls from ragazzi who call in expressing thier affection for certain girls in the audience (lots of giggling and pushing each other there). Ambra of course is nonstop talking and even maybe yelling and of course extremely animated (as you’d expect). And then after 5 or 6 of these calls she sings and dances a final song and the girls all dance and sing along and then we cut to a wide shot of the entire studio and we’re done.
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Here in the US for a while in 1999 and 2000 we had discussions of the sexualization of teens - brought on by Britney Spears’ image as a 16 year old Catholic High School girl slut-tease. Britney was sexualized, but in fact I think Italian girls are just as sexualized (but maybe not as sexual or sexually active). I always have to remind myself to hack off about 5 years from my age estimate whenever I see an attractive young woman in Rome.
I snapped a few photos of the show and the image is somewhat contradictory. First, the Ambra’s audience members are all probably between the ages of 13 or 14 to maybe 18 or 19, max. They all are wearing some sort of approved outfit - crushed velvet jewel-toned short or long dresses or short or long pants overalls. Sexy, but not overly so. Cute. They also wear bike shorts underneath the short dresses. Modest. They have nice (and some cases elaborate and expensive) hairstyles. Secondly, it’s all very wholesome fun. Girls dancing, singing, laughing together. Quite fun for them, I’m sure.
The production and direction were incredibly amusing. I couldn’t figure out if the crew were just rookies or if they were doing this stuff on purpose, but I got a laugh. During one of Sabina’s ("Sabina! Sabina! Sabina!")’s talk segments the camera was catching candids of the girls. A lot of them were just sitting there with their chins on their hands obviously bored out of their minds. I wasn’t - I was laughing out loud every time the director would catch one.
But... why would the director be confirming that the topic was boring? As a joke? Because he didn’t know better? Invariably the girl who was "caught" would react with embarrassment or horror when she realized she was on camera.
Ultimately I can’t imagine why this show was successful. It couldn’t have been very entertaining to watch at home. The singing was generally pretty bad even though they were lip-synching. The dancing was uninventive and simplistic too. One segment was a dance group that repeated the same four to eight moves four times to a simple dance music beat - no doubt so the girls at home could dance along.
And Ambra, darling, please shut up once in a while!
Paradoxically, the best TV show I’ve ever seen was also in Italy.
Back in May-June 1999 I spent a month in Italy just being your typical American-moron tourist. I spent some amount of time in the Naples area and caught a great show in between the interminable Ricky Martin talk show appearances that week (he must have been in the country on tour because he was everywhere) I caught a show on Naples TV.
It was a simple but brilliant concept. The host of the show would come out and say the Italian equivalent of "Good evening, ladies and gentlemen." And make some charming chit chat of some sort. He’d then introduce a woman. She would come out say "Hi" and chit chat for a bit with the host. She would then proceed to remove her clothes and walk over to the rotating round bed with overhead camera (RRBWOC) to much applause. Then, another woman would come out and do the same. She’d join the first woman on the RRBWOC. Maybe a music segment or some chit chat or whatever and then we’d continue with the good stuff. After 30 or so minutes we had 5 or 6 women naked on the RRBWOC.
And then it was "Thank you and good night everybody!"
That’s it! What a great, great show. I can’t tell you how utterly amazed and amused I was by it.
Maybe Ambra should appear on that one...
Here are the photos.
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