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Just like marmite, you either love it or you hate it. MATTHEW VELLA meets Rachel Vella, the presenter of Tista’ Tkun Int.
I have just emerged from the world of Tista’ Tkun Int and presenter Rachel Vella is aching to know whether we are about to rain bad publicity on her and her show, the do-gooder fantasy that has become part and parcel of public broadcasting, commanding audiences of well over 100,000 viewers tuning in weekly to have their fix of sob stories and tales of suffering and heartbreak.
Isn’t it ironic that after entering peoples’ lives, truth be told with the best of intentions, it gets uncomfortable having others questioning your persona and your programme? I suppose it’s the pitfall of television narcissism.
Although Rachel opens her arms to us and frankly answers all the questions she is asked, one senses her discomfort at having her good actions questioned. It is only because the curious fixation of the Maltese with TTI is so baffling that gets people interested in the programme in the first place, or people like media critic Mario Azzopardi calling the wide support enjoyed by the programme ‘distressing’.
But like Azzopardi, the critics who resist having their heartstrings pulled by Rachel Vella and the visible joy she brings to her guests, question the cynicism of the programme’s blatant mix of personal tragedy, entertainment and voyeurism.
“This is a television programme. It offers entertainment to render the programme less dramatic and more appealing to viewers. What is wrong with people dancing and singing? Both aspects are associated with life, which at the end of the day is what our programme is all about. After all life itself is made of serious and less serious things which compliment each other,” she says about the first misgivings on the show.
If ratings are anything to go by, the critics are in a minority. But it is enough to make Rachel Vella adamant to show me that all she is doing is being done in good faith, giving me an exhaustive list of the happiness dispensed every week on the TTI sofa. And when I ask her how much revenue the programme cashes in, she tells me she hopes the programme will break even once the ad money comes in. “Look, if you think I am doing this for the money…” she says. Which incidentally, I don’t think she is. The financial mainstay, I assume, is the travel agency and financial services company she operates at her headquarters in Mellieha, the village she grew up in.
Everything in this office here centres around the 32-year old, former PE teacher. Her small-island iconic status is so great it cannot even stand the width of her subterranean war room – complete with editing suite and makeshift film studio – every single wall is adorned by Rachel on the magazine covers and in the photographs with her guests. It is almost a shrine, but not in the creepy sense, more in a well-meaning kind of way, with a purely accidental narcissism.
Behind her desk, the largest picture is of her and David Beckham, just one of the plethora of stars to give up their time to make one of Rachel’s guests happy just by touching the hem of their garment. Another one is of a kid who succumbed to leukaemia, two days after meeting the brother he had never seen before. Rachel looks at the picture and tells me that “this is what Tista Tkun Int is all about.”
In reality, it is useless questioning whether Rachel Vella’s intentions are good or not. Although she goes to painstaking lengths to convince me, I do not doubt them for an instance, but how to make sense out of her good actions and that tinge of misguided television funfare: throwing in somebody with cerebral palsy or victims of domestic violence in front of 100,000 viewers tends to raise eyebrows, especially with traipsing models and dancers clashing with the morose tone of the show.
It is of course true that so many of Rachel’s guests, who come from broken families, scenes of domestic violence, severe disabilities, long-lost relatives, and terminal illnesses, leave the TTI studio happy – a dream destination, a refurbished home, a reuniting with a relative they have never seen or never knew existed, or meeting up with a celebrity.
It is all about ‘following a dream’ as Rachel puts it: “Everyone has a dream. Everyone has aims and ambitions in life. All of us pass through difficult phases and could do with a bit of support at these crucial times. Of course, TTI cannot fulfil everybody’s wishes, but at least for those who are on the sofa, we try to do our very best.”
So how do these agents of salvation respond to their critics? Because despite the general thumbs-up of the Maltese audience, it is hard to punish TTI. So what if an Elvis impersonator sings one moment and the next you have a sobbing family crying out for their father to come back home – give that highbrow antagonism a rest, right?
On one part, the Malta Psychological Association recently raised its concerns on programmes such as TTI with the Public Broadcasting Services. Today the Broadcasting Authority has introduced new guidelines on exposing vulnerable people on TV. Given that TTI’s raw material is the unfortunate, the disabled and all of God’s other unfortunate creatures, it is arguable that Tista Tkun Int is the McDonalds of all sob factories.
Rachel takes on the criticism which certain psychologists pass about the programme: that the vulnerable are being exposed to the public and whether these people are giving an informed consent to appearing on television without the bait of TTI’s lavish gifts, since the start of the show now totalling over Lm850,000.
Rachel is quick to point out her satisfaction at the BA guidelines and that a resident psychologist has long been on board to assess her guests. Case in point, her resident psychologist is also her cousin.
“Incidentally she is. My cousin is a graduated psychologist in Malta and the UK. She is not just my cousin. Her profession takes priority. Our relation does not affect her independence, absolutely not. Roberta is very strict and we don’t want it to be any other way. However, even in the absence of Roberta in our first years of TTI, we were and still are aided, maybe to your surprise, by Joe Gerada, the head of Appogg.”
If psychologists raise the question of whether her cousin can offer impartial assistance to the guests, Rachel says the statement is based on hearsay. “We have never offered financial gain or any other reward for participation. I am aware that one of the things that she ensures herself of is that participation is voluntary and that participants do not feel pressured to take part in any way.
“I don’t agree with you that people come to TTI because of the prizes. There is much more than that and most cases on TTI do not involve financial gain. Our most typical stories are reunions. Granted, it takes money to make it happen, but what the people take from that is not financial.”
She points out that the programme is not a charitable institution, although she doesn’t exclude that the people and companies who give gifts for their guests are indeed making an act of charity.
“As a matter of personal opinion, I always like to think the better of others, and trust that sponsors contribute not for the sole intention of advertising but also out of generosity, and hence for a good cause. I believe it is genuine Maltese solidarity.”
Hard to argue against charity. But an MPA spokesperson says the bad thing about the show is giving the impression that a new bedroom can solve a social problem. And that is why I ask Rachel whether she is trivialising serious stuff into a television variety show. I tell her the programme somehow throws in consumerist aspirations with a message that television can save the day for these people, because as she says, people believe in the programme and the good it does.
“I will never claim that it is a problem solver. However, I know that it has helped a lot of Maltese people,” she says, referring to cases in which peoples’ lives somewhat turned to the best once they faced their situations on TV. “Obviously my wish is to have happy ending stories and ‘to live happily ever after’ in every single case we tackled, but life has its ups and downs and it is far from perfect and I can not guarantee the impossible.”
Unsparingly, Mario Azzopardi says the programme portrays an element of transparent pretentiousness, its presenters parading as agents of salvation for the distraught. “It is a shame that the Maltese viewer has allowed the creation of icon-status for presenters who churn out such exploitative stuff. The thought is repulsive.”
If Rachel is an icon, she is surely revered amongst her many faithful. People come to her in full Catholic venerability to tell her heaven awaits her, although she modestly concedes to me that such praise does little to bowl her over. A mailbag of 40,000 letters testifies the success of the programme.
When I ask for her message to the critics, she says, unsurprisingly, that it is very easy to criticise in life. “Do you know who does not get any criticism? Those who just sit there and never do anything in their life. If every single person in life tries their best to bring a smile to other peoples’ faces, then we all would be living in a much happier world.
“I invite all of you to come there. We have no problems. The entire body of Malta’s psychologists can come to the show, and you will see the difference in a person before they enter the show and where they leave.
“If I manage to bring a smile to peoples’ faces for just those five minutes, everything else, including all the hard work, is worthwhile,” she candidly says.
It has been a hard day for Rachel, having to make it for the interview at ten in the morning just hours after finishing the Thursday night show. For the rest of the day, she calls to see if we are going to give TTI a hard time and whether our photos do justice to her screen image. But it’s not about passing judgement, is it? It’s putting the camera lens, or rather the question, on to her, if only just for once.
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