Grand Prix

David Oyelowo, star of Shoot the Messenger

Ben Dowell, in the first of his fortnightly TV features, reports back from the Prix Italia , the international competition with awards for TV, radio and the web's documentaries, drama, the performing arts and music.

The Italians are very often the best and the worst at things. When it comes to city architecture theirs is the best. Their food is second to none, As for their cultural history – Leonardo da Vinci, Cicero, Marcus Aurelius, Titian. I don’t need to go on.

But when it comes to TV, or  indeed organising a television festival. Well. They aint world leaders, put it that way.
But somehow it is all a bit magnificent, albeit in a very haphazard way.

I have just come back from the Prix Italia, my second visit to the prestigious radio and television festival.
Last year it was in Venice, this year Verona. I was very spoiled. It is quite the most beautiful small city you could ever hope to visit.

As for the Prix, it contained some very worthy discussion forums – the head of Iraqi TV ‘s picture of trying to broadcast there put any moans from anyone in the European West to shame.
And the Prix was also notable for ITV's deputy chairman, Sir George Russell, attacking political correctness in television, claiming it is "boxing in" broadcasters and turning them into "wimps".

But the real point of the Prix is the awards - for radio and TV arts, documentary and drama programmes.

Last year was notable for the fact that the BBC struggled to win anything.
While this year – and this sums up the unpredictably nature of the Prix - the Beeb won four awards: three for its radio programmes and a television award for the BBC2 film Shoot the Messenger, which won the best single play award.

Starring former Spooks star David Oyelowo as middle class teacher Joe, Shoot the Messenger was a dark comedy which tells the story of Joe being falsely accused of assaulting a young black pupil and being ostracised from the black community. It was very good and deserved to win something.

It is also hard to imagine a better radio play than Radio 4 drama Metropolis - writer Peter Straughan's futuristic story about the son of the head of a large industrial complex – which won the Prix’s best adapted radio drama prize.

Best radio drama was given to Radio 3's The Incomplete Recorded Works of a Dead Body, a dark story about an Iranian sound recordist's last days. It was written by playright Ed Hime, who had never heard a radio play before he started writing the piece, according to the BBC.

The third radio winner was Don't Hang Up, Radio 4's programme, which won the radio documentary award. The programme featured presenter Alan Dein garnering a number of life stories by randomly calling public telephone boxes around the world and was quite fun.

The major disappointment of the evening, however,  and the festival as a whole, was the occasionally random nature of the gong giving.

For example, given the previous winner’s you would have thought that one or other of the shortlisted programmes  - Simon Schama's a History of Art and an edition of the South Bank Show about American composer Steve Reich – would win the television performing arts award.

But neither did. Instead the award went to Polish Television's The Music Lesson, a low budget profile of a children's piano teacher which looked fun but was not award worthy.

And here’s the rub. The prizes are decided by very esteemed people sitting on juries where hour upon hour (usually at least 30)  entries are listened to and discussed over a period which can last days.
 It sums up the Italian approach to media which is very different from ours and which has an academic rigour that may be missing from Bafta or Royal Television Society juries (I have sat on both a number of times).

But during a seminar I attended we were given a clue as to why the decision was a little perverse.  Jurors and delegates rounded on the BBC and Schama for having too high a budget – they reckoned 200k an hour.

Should the fact that the BBC invests big money in big quality work be a reason not to give it an award and prefer something (the Polish piano doc) that looked like it was filmed and directed by an amateur on a hand held camera?

And yet. And yet. The producers of Don’t Hang Up told me that they were hearing the opposite argument from their colleagues from foreign broadcasters – to whit, they hoped they wouldn’t win because they would then go back to their bosses who would expect them to make something award winning on the kind of small budget that Don’t Hang Up had.

Please Prix Italia dudes – maker your minds up! Some consistency. Please.

Still, on a lighter note, forget Dancing on Ice and Kelly Brook and all that Strictly Come Dancing hoo ha.
The real hot footed young thing strutting their stuff at the BBC is the director of policy and strategy Caroline Thomson - in Italy at least.

Last year the game exec was hauled up on stage at the opening ceremony of the Prix Italia in Venice and forced to perform with a harlequin, assorted clowns and a lute orchestra during a bizarre rendition of the Commedia dell'Arte, a kind of Italian Punch and Judy. 
Apparently  the whole thing was broadcast unedited on Rai, the Italian state broadcaster.

According to festival director Pierluigi Malesani, who is also a senior Rai exec, Thompson cannot now live it down. "She was on holiday in Italy after that and she kept getting recognised by people who remembered her dance," the Rai exec told me with a hearty chuckle. "Her dancing is famous across Italy.” 
And as if to prove his point, he performed a little dance with her again prior to this year’s awards ceremony in Verona which was an extremly odd affair -  very long with plenty of scantily clad ladies.
But don’t get me started on that….



 

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