TV Review

For some time, a TV show has grown into one season as others in ten. It seems that Simona Gheorghe, the host of the show "Access Direct" on Antena 1, found the way to the wishes of the Romanian viewer, this great master of the remote control.

I remember Oreste from the '90s when, together with Teo Trandafir and Mircea Badea, he did the morning show on Antena 1. He resonated very well with the humour of the protagonists, had brilliant retorts, knew how to undertake a “scapegoat” role but, at the same time, had build a very thorough “character”, with a clear purpose in the dynamic of the show.

The year ended and began with Şerban Huidu. He was now struggling between death and life, then feeling great, later with standing minimum chances, later maximum. The topic was, they couldn’t help it, developed. “What was he doing skiing in Austria; that's what he gets for not staying at home”, some said. “Austrians are not good with tourism! That was no ski slope! Why was there an ice layer?” other wondered.

Since 1990 on, Mircea Dinescu, taken by some for a poet, by others for a journalist, and others for a slick, struggled to be original. Nothing wrong with it and non-conformism can be a solution to save yourself of the magmas of anonymity, especially when the country is loaded of poets, journalists and slicks.

Thursday evening, on the show “Sinteza zilei” ("Summary of the Day ") on Antena 3, Mihai Gâdea broadcasted a documentary film made by the Germans, Spiegel TV to be more precise, about a landfill in Vişeul de Sus , the "theatrical space" where a certain Moldovan family carries on and, in general, mimes a living.

Whenever it comes to the question of Bessarabia, the common Romanian, just as the exceptional one, will take a deep breathe, and then releases it in a sigh. I mean, you see, the matter is of his highest concern, but he's powerless in tackling it.. Next, perhaps, a brief tirade about history and about its guilt and the Soviet wickedness, some complacent and mannerist sympathy given in false generosity and that's it, our job done.

For a while, the only news somewhat objective were to be found on the Romanian National Television, and their newscast could be described as the acceptable mirror of the unacceptable Romanian realities. Unfortunately, ethical drifts in the public television have become the natural state of things in recent months

More than ever, the flagrant ignorance of Romanian television for a major event such as the National Theatre Festival has shown a certain radical inability for the survival of genuine culture on the telly. Frankly, I wasn't expecting any live broadcasts, feverish accounts from the Bulandra or National, any extended interviews of Warlikowski or Garcia, studios in the foyer of the Metropolis Theatre...

Columns were born and have passed away, TV programs had their glory then went to oblivion, TV projects have gone from agony to ecstasy with a haste that requires reflection on the impermanence of all things that there are… And yet, amid this evolutional uproar, something has remained stable, like an island of permanence, a fragile illusion of endless continuity: the weather section.

At the beginning of the 2000s, I believe, when Romanian television was just discovering the pleasure of the cruses between “talk” and “show”, an individual somewhat different made his appearance. Not regularly, but with quite disarming confidence and sufficiency