this week

What a week!

HE’S BACK. THE MAN WITH A RING ON EVERY FINGER, PETER BUSUTTIL, GIVING US MUSIC AND OTHER NOISES. INTERVIEW BY ZILLAH BUGEJA

I’ve had a particularly weird week. I can’t forget the day of the funeral of one of my best friends, Mario Muscat. In a way I’ll say that having friends die is not the end of the world, because you create a new and deeper relationship with them. I believe that Mario is here with me all the time and can become a more integral part of my life. He, George Pullicino and I were at sixth form together. We used to be inseparable – we had set up the first students council and had taken our headmaster to court.

Mario was born with one arm, and he used to let me joke about it. He was also very stylish, so I wore an orange shirt to the funeral in honour of him. There were some things I had wanted to talk to him about, namely his decision to become a Dominican priest, to see if he was making the right decision. Now I’ll never know.

I’ve spent the week running around finalising the run-up to my new TV programme on NET, Red: Muzika u Hsejjes Ohra.

Vodafone is one of our major sponsors, the reason being that I’ll be using telephony in an innovative way. Not that I can divulge everything to you, suffice it to say that there’ll be competitions using SMS messaging, data stream, a webcam in a particular public place.

The programme will be innovative in many respects. It will have three repeats, because people take in TV in a very casual manner – I don’t believe anyone watches programmes in one go. So you can watch your 15 minutes, really enjoy it, and catch up on other nights. I don’t believe in survey results, and won’t until they do what every civilised country does and use sample families. We use TV as a moving image in the home, often without sound, leaving it on throughout the day.

So the main version of Red is on Wednesday at 10pm, with another screening on Friday at noon, Saturday at 5pm and probably one on Sunday. It will have adult content in the form of a sex information slot, where we’ll be giving information in a tongue-in-cheek way – definitely something I wouldn’t want my mother to watch! Though this is the stuff that will be omitted from the Friday afternoon programme, but it’s not as if you can control what people watch nowadays.

We’ll have live bands in the studio – which is a novelty nowadays – playing unplugged, such as Scream Daisy, an up-and-coming band. We’ll always have two live bands, that is, a guest band and the resident band. We’ll cover all the major events happening in Malta but not only. We’ll have regular updates on the tat-Tribu festival that’s going to be held on 15 August, for example.

This is not a boxed-in programme in any way. Even the name, red, on a blue station! Why Red? The set will have red floor and sides, with 14 chandeliers. And I’ve always wanted to do something with the colour red, even though it’s a no-no colour for TV. It’s so alive.

There’ll be Chiara and Lawrence Gray as co-presenters, with me in the middle, quite a contrast. I don’t sing, and I’m going to be the only one who is out of tune.

What else? Fashion anecdotes, where we’ll have three fashion gurus talking to us, and get clips of fashion but not of their shops as such.

It’s meant to be fast, so that you won’t have time to zap because you won’t know what you’ll be missing next. There’ll be links with a beach watch in collaboration with Hawaiian Tropic. I think that social messages come across better if they are infused in the programme and done in an entertaining fashion. Problems like road rage, which have never been tackled before, will be dealt with by the Auto Trader corner.

Our cinema feature will be based on gossip, the kind of things you wouldn’t normally know. And I’m looking forward to the slot where I’ll be phoning up two people and crossing the lines, getting them to talk to each other while they think they are talking to me. They will get the chance to win stuff for their troubles.

This week the Gary Neville soccer school came to an end and I was asked to present the awards evening at the Hamrun Spartans nursery. We organised animation while the 380 children were waiting for it to start.

On Mondays I get up at 6am because I have a problem with the dustbin men: I never know what time they’ll pass by! So I take out the rubbish, water the plants, wash my clothes. Gianni and I went on site to check the set-up at the national pool for the opening ceremony of the European Youth Swimming and Diving Championships. There were over a thousand people taking part, Maltese too, and I don’t know why the media didn’t give it more coverage. We got together a 15 piece percussion band which sounded really good together, like a Brazilian street band. Later on I had a big argument with ASA who took down half of the banners so I brought down the rest. There was a misunderstanding about the term ‘product exposure’…

A lot of my time is spent dealing with finance, a primary concern, because I create money in order to realise my dreams.

I also play football twice a week, at 9.30pm with people from St James, namely my brother, Jean Claude Muscat and others. A good workout is so good for the soul. By 11.30pm it’s back to Mdina for a quick shower and off to Mellieha, to Waves 2 for midnight. On Monday there we hold Junky Pescio parties, have been doing so for five years.

I was interviewed on Peter Cossai’s tourism programme when I heckled the NTOM for thinking that Malta is a destination where people come to see museums. I came out a bit strong. People who work in my trade know that tourists mainly come to be entertained. Everyone who travels goes out to eat, catches a show and goes for a drink, no matter what the age. The entertainment industry should be recognised as the visitor-puller that it is.

This Friday was a special day. I went to see my nephews James, Peter and Thomas perform at Masquerade. I had encouraged them to join in the first place. Thomas and James were some kind of animal and James was the main character.

Spent Friday night at home. I washed all the floors and then cooked dinner at midnight. Then my Australian friend came over for a drink.

Saturday was still hectic. Had an 11am production meeting trying to put together what items we were going to have in the programme, as well as the running order.

But in the afternoon I spent some quiet time at home, watched a film on TV and had to be at Hamrun Spartans. Keith and his girlfriend came over and I cooked for him, my way of bribing him to do a good job on the technical aspect at Audiovision studios. Gianni came over for supper as well. I cooked pasta – I’m a good cook, used to cook in a so-called pub in Milan the size of Henry J Beans.

I’m not only involved in this programme but I’m a partner in the Argentinian steakhouses, I do their PR and marketing as well as for other outlets on a consultancy basis.

I’ve been taking a break because of Red, otherwise I’d have stayed up till 8am on Saturday and Sunday. So on Sunday I thoroughly enjoyed a relaxing day Gianni and I went to the beach, so it was like a relaxed meeting day.

My hobby is doing precisely that, managing night clubs and catering establishments. Whatever is not TV and the theatre is not work, but my hobby.