Aldo Dalla Vecchia, “Vita da giornalaia”

I dealt extensively with this text, when it was still a rough work of a play that was about to go on stage. I can only add that now this single act has become a real book, with a delightful cover, which recalls, in fact, the life of a newsagent, spent inside a hypothetical, colorful newsstand, full of all the publications dear to the author.

Compared to the theatrical script, the off-stage voice has turned into a character who asks questions. The question arises that interviewee and interviewer are the same person. It is Aldo Dalla Vecchia himself, it is inside his memory that he searches for bittersweet bits of life.

The topics are those usually dealt with by the author: the apprenticeship as a journalist, the career on the rise, which led him to work as the author of important television programs and collaborator of well-known newspapers, direct contact with the most important and glamorous characters of the tv show. They may seem issues that are not particularly relevant or committed, but to enliven them there are the sweetness and grace with which Dalla Vecchia talks about them. His passion is deep, everything is permeated with nostalgia, sweet but not sugary, tender and delicate like his soul as an eternal respectable boy.

Through our memories, we retrace television times that have now disappeared, which have become almost epic, we meet characters that are perhaps over the top but always elegant. They appear to us more attractive, cleaner, more fascinating than those of today. Or, who knows, maybe it is only regret that makes everything that is now only reminiscent seem beautiful. Like the episodes of “The House in the Prairie”, like the dramas, the Thursday quizzes, the Portobello parrot. Like everything that reminds us of how we used to be and how we will never be again.

The transition from state TV to the saucy one of commercial networks is fundamental. And this is all the more significant in this moment when everything is changing again in an epochal way, with the arrival of digital channels, on-demand and interactive TV.

“The end of the Seventies marked, at least for me as a child and a television enthusiast, an epochal transition and a beneficial shock, with the arrival of color programs and the birth of private TVs, one above all Telemilano 58, the future Channel 5, where I found many of my favorites. “

What remains of those pioneering times? The cathode world we knew is disappearing, the greats of the past are leaving, one by one, now only illustrious ghosts in Techetechetè, more like a sad obituary than a lively early evening.