1968 in Italian television

Events

• The miniseries L'Odissea and La famiglia Benvenuti begin a new trend in the RAI fiction: they are shot in color by film directors and with a cinematographic style. However, RAI does not stop producing the traditional “scripted novels” in theatrical style.January 6: Dalida wins Partitissima with Dan dan dan.January 15: the broadcast schedule of the National Channel is extended to the lunch time, now covering the time slots from 12:30 AM to 2 PM and from 17 PM to 23.30 PM ; the 1.30 PM news program begins broadcasting. In the first edition, the journalist Piero Angela, visibly upset, gives the tragic news of the Belice earthquake.February 3: the Sanremo Festival, hosted for the first time by Pippo Baudo, is won by Sergio Endrigo and Roberto Carlos with Canzone per te. Endrigo is the first of the cantautori to win first place. The show is marked by the presence of illustrious jazzmen, such as Lionel Hampton and Louis Armstrong. It also includes a controversy between the former friends Adriano Celentano and Don Backy for a copyright question, quarreling in front of the RAI cameras.
• June 6: first news marathon in Italian television. From noon to the evening, Piero Angela in studio and Andrea Barbato from Los Angeles follow the events related to the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy.
• August 18: on the magazine Tv7, goes on air I bambini di Bien Hoa, an impressive reportage by Furio Colombo, almost completely without spoken comment, about the American bombing in Vietnam. The program arouses protests and charges of anti-Americanism; the director of the RAI news Fabiano Fabiani is forced to resign.
• October 1: the Swiss television begins color broadcasting, in time for the Mexico Olympic Games. Soon, many Italian viewers prefer the Italian Swiss channel, in color and not politically conditioned, to RAI.

Debuts

Variety

• Oggi le comiche – Anthology, hosted by Renzo Palmer, of comic shorts from the golden age of silent film.
• Senza rete – Musical show of the summer; lasted for 8 seasons, with various hosts. So called because the singers perform “without the net” of the play-back, it gets, in some years, up 18 million viewers.

Serials

• La famiglia Benvenuti – by Alfredo Giannetti, with Enrico Maria Salerno, Valeria Valeri and Claudio Gora. This family comedy about the life of a middle-class family is, by now, a precious time capsule about the Italian way of life in the late Sixties. It gets a great success by public and critic and, in 1969, a second season in colors is shot. Later, it's no more shown, because the child star Giusva Fioravanti becomes a NAR terrorist.
• I ragazzi di padre Tobia by Mario Casacci and Alberto Ciambricco. It's a serial for kid about the adventures of a boy-scout band and their spiritual leader, the unconventional parson Father Tobia.

News and educational

Television shows

Drama and comedy

• Il caso Chessman – by Giuseppe FinaPiccola città   - by Silverio Blasi, from Thorntorn Wilder's play, with Raoul Grassilli and Giulia Lazzarini.The miracle worker by William Gibson, directed by Davide Montemurri, with Anna Proclemer and Cinzia De Carolis.Processo a porte aperte – cycle of true crime dramas, directed by Lydia C. Ripandelli; the verdict of a jury of viewers is compared with that of the real trial.I giorni della storia - cycle of historical docudramas. It includes L'affare Dreyfus – by Leandro Castellani, with Gianni Santuccio as Émile Zola.Stasera Fernandel – cycle of comedy or comedy-thriller tv-movies, coproduced with France, directed by Camillo Mastrocinque.

Light theatre

• Addio giovinezza – by Antonello Falqui, with Nino Castelnuovo and the singer Gigliola Cinquetti, from the Camasio and Oxilia’s play about the love affairs of two undergraduates.Felicita Colombo – by Antonello Falqui, from the Giuseppe Adami’s play, with Franca Valeri, Gino Bramieri and Ottavia Piccolo. In Milan, two exponents of opposite social classes become in-laws.L'acqua cheta – by Augusto Novelli, directed by Alessandro Brissoni, with Arnoldo Foà, The piece, a classic of Florentine dialect theater, tells the love intrigues of the two daughters of a cabman.

Miniseries

Period drama

• Il circolo Pickwick – by Ugo Gregoretti, with Raffaele Pisu as Pickwick, Enzo Cerusico as Samuel Weller and Gigi Proietti as Jingle. Breaking with the traditional seriousness of the Italian period dramas, the director transposes the Dickens’ novel in a light-hearted and experimental style, sometimes also appearing onscreen, in modern dresses, to chat with the characters.Tartarino sulle Alpi – from Alphonse Daudet’s Tartarin sur les Alpes, follow-up to Tartarin of Tarascon, by Edmo Fenoglio, with Tino Buazzelli; 4 episodes.
• La freccia nera – by Anton Giulio Majano, with Aldo Reggiani, Loretta Goggi and Arnoldo Foà, from the Stevenson’s novel. It was one of the show most loved by the youngest ones and the title track by Riz Ortolani became a hit.
• Le mie prigioni – by Sandro Bolchi, with Raoul Grassilli and Arnoldo Foà, from the autobiographical book of Silvio Pellico.
• Non cantare, spara – by Daniele D’Anza, with the Quartetto Cetra. Musical parody of the western movies, it was a clamorous flop, notwithstanding its stellar cast.
• L’Odissea – by Franco Rossi, with Bekim Fehmiu as Odysseus and Irene Papas as Penelope. It was the first great coproduction among European televisions, of a spectacular value never got before on the little screen. Shot in color, it was seen in black and white by the Italian viewers; notwithstanding, it was the hit of the year for public and critic The 80 years old poet Giuseppe Ungaretti introduced every episode reading his Homer’s’ translation.Cristoforo Colombo – biopic, cioproduced with Spain, by Vittorio Cottafavi, with Francisco Rabal in the tilte role, Roldano Lupi and Paola Pitagora; 4 episodes.

Mystery

• Sherlock Holmes – by Guglielmo Morandi, with Nando Gazzolo in the title role, from The valley of fear and The hound of the Baskervilles.
• La donna di quadri – mystery by Leonardo Cortese, with Ubaldo Lay as the police lieutenant Sheridan. It's the second chapter of the “cycle of the queens”. As in the others Sheridan's inquiries, the story is set in a fictive America, fully reconstructed in studio.
• I racconti del maresciallo – by Mario Landi, from the stories of Mario Soldati. Turi Ferro plays magisterially a Carabinier's Marshasl, zealous at work but very human; his stories are, more than detective tales, sketches about the Italian province life.

Variety

• Canzonissima 1968 – hosted by Mina, Walter Chiari and Paolo Panelli. The winner of the traditional musical competition of the winter is Gianni Morandi, with Scende la pioggia.It's the most seen show of the year, with 21, 2 million viewiers.
• Che domenica amici – hosted by Raffaele Pisu and the duo Ric e Gian.
• Quelli della domenica – comic variety, broadcast the Sunday afternoon. It revealed to a large public the duo Cochi e Renato and moreover the disturbing and grotesque humor by Paolo Villaggio. The Genoese comic created, for the show, two of his most famous characters: the professor Otto von Kranz, a German illusionist, arrogant and muddler, and Giandomenico Fracchia, a pusillanimous clerk oppressed by his superiors.
• Delia Scala story – tribute show to the famous soubrette.
• Su e giù – quiz, hosted by Corrado Maltoni.
• Vengo anch’io – hosted by Raffaele Pisu.

News and educational

• Appunti per un film sull’India – by Pier Paolo Pasolini. The writer-director, in spite of his very fierce critics on TV and mass-culture, accepts to realize for RAI a documentary about  “hunger and religion in the Third world”. In the same year, he meets Ezra Pound for the TV magazine Incontri.
• Questa nostra Italia – by Guido Piovene and Virgilio Sabel. Piovene repeats, for the television, the tour of Italy already performed in 1955 for the radio.I Beatles in ritiro - reportage by Furio Colombo for TV/Un’ora con Herbert Marcuse – by Gastone Favero, for the magazine Incontri.Faccia a faccia – talk-show about political and social questions, with average people as guests, hosted by Aldo Falivena.

Ending this year

• Almanacco
• Non è mi troppo tardi

Deaths