Raphael Vassallo
Italian TV presenter and quiz show master Mike Bongiorno died yesterday at the age of 85 – two months after the government ignored a proposal to award the veteran broadcaster with an Honoris Causa from the University of Malta.
The suggestion was made by former tourism minister Joe Grima, who remembers being hosted by ‘TeleMike’ on Canale 5 in the 1980s: “I first met Mike Bongiorno in 1986, shortly after the Americans bombed Libya,” Grima recalls. “The bombing had an immediate impact on Malta’s tourism, with bookings dropping to practically zero, especially from Italy. We embarked on a campaign featuring spots on Canale 5, and I was invited as a guest on Bongiorno’s programme...”
Grima, himself a former television presenter, remembers Bongiorno as “a professional to the hilt”.
“His programme was the beginning and end of everything to him, and it was a pleasure to see the respect with which he treated his guests,” Grima recalls.
“Very recently I suggested to (tourism minister) Mario de Marco that he nominate Mike Bongiorno for an ‘honorificenza’ from Malta, in appreciation of his enormous contribution to broadcasting, and knowing that these kind of honours were among the things Mike valued most at that point in his life. As far as I know the proposal was passed onto to someone in the ministry, and that was the last I heard of it.”
Matthew Vella
The great Italian TV presenter Mike Bongiorno died yesterday of heart failure while on holiday Montecarlo. He was 85.
The news was announced by Sky TV, the channel with which Bongiorno had been scheduled to start work on quiz show, after Mediaset turned down an offer to renew his contract last March. On 26 March 2009 Bongiorno signed for Sky after Mediaset decided not to give him a new contract, and was planned to start a new TV show on the satellite TV later on this year 2009.
Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, erstwhile employer as head of the Mediaset empire that was in part defined by Bongiorno’s personality, said he had lost a friend. “A great protagonist in the history of Italian TV has left us. He dreamt of becoming a senator,” Berlusconi said.
Maurizio Costanzo, one of Bongiorno’s contemporaries, said the presenter had the ability of making up “his own errors and gaffes”. Pippo Baudo, Bongiorno’s effective counterpart on state television Rai, said he was the first TV sensation.
Bongiorno was born on 26 May, 1924 as Michael Nicholas Salvatore Bongiorno, in New York City but moved to Turin, his mother’s home city, early in life.
During WWII he abandoned his studies and joined a group of Italian partisans. He was captured and spent seven months in the San Vittore prison in Milan and was then deported to a German concentration camp. He was liberated before the end of the war due to a prisoner of war exchange between the USA and Nazi Germany.
When he returned to Italy in 1953 he appeared in Arrivi e Partenze (Arrivals and Departures) on the TV channel Rai on the very first day of official public TV transmissions in Italy. From 1955 to 1959 he hosted the quiz show Lascia o Raddoppia – the first successful quiz show on Italian TV, and became one of the most famous Italian TV programs ever.
Another successful program was Campanile Sera (Bell Tower Evening, 1959-1962), in which a southern Italian town and a northern one challenged each other with questions made to representatives of the two towns who were present in the studio and practical games played by citizens situated at the same towns.
Beginning in 1963 he hosted eleven editions of the Sanremo Festival.
He moved to Tele Milano – now Canale 5 – one of the first Italian commercial TV channels owned by Silvio Berlusconi’s Mediaset, to host I sogni nel cassetto. After a brief return to RAI with the news-game Flash (1980-1982), he continued working for Mediaset quiz programmes Bis (1981-1990), (1982-1985), Pentathlon (1985-1987), (1987-1992), Tris (1990-1991), the statistic game Tutti per uno) and from 1989 to 2003 La Ruota della Fortuna.
He won 24 Telegatto, the Italian TV prize, and on May 26, 2004, in occasion of his 80th birthday, he was appointed Grand Official of the Order of Merit of the Italian Republic.
Until 2005 he hosted Genius on Rete 4and in 2006 and 2007 he hosted the prime-time quiz show Il Migliore. More recently, he was also a guest of the second episode of the Gianfranco Funari’s show Apocalypse Show on Rai Uno.
Any comments?
If you wish your comments to be published in our Letters pages please click button below. Please write a contact number and a postal address where you may be contacted.
Download front page in pdf file format
All the interviews from Reporter on MaltaToday's YouTube channel.
