GBR TV
GBR TV was an Italian television station based in Rome.
Born as a radio station in 1974, it rose to national prominence in 1978 when, beating even RAI, it was the only media outlet to broadcast live the phases of the discovery of Aldo Moro's body at the end of his 55 days of imprisonment.
That legacy made it one of the most important private television stations in the capital and perhaps in Italy, a position consolidated also thanks to the political closeness of the various owners with the parties in government at the time, which guaranteed the programming presenters and guests of great notoriety and advertising appeal.
With the advent of the Mani pulite investigation of 1992-93 and the arrest of numerous entrepreneurs and financiers close to the Christian Democratic and Socialist areas, the economic resources of the various media subsidized by them also disappeared, including GBR itself, which consequently underwent a drastic downsizing. Declared bankrupt in 1996, it was reborn with mixed success on a satellite platform in 2002 without ever experiencing the success of its first golden decade, and in 2013 it definitively ceased its activity.
GBR was responsible for the emergence of figures who subsequently gained notoriety in the large national television networks, such as Franco Alfano in journalism and Milly Carlucci and Gianni Ippoliti in entertainment.
History
Early years
The original nucleus of the future television station saw the light in 1974 as a radio station under the initiative of Giovanni "Gianni" Del Piano, an entrepreneur who owned a consumer electronics business in Rome as well as the owner of the relay stations which spread the signals of Telemontecarlo and Televisione Svizzera Italiana in Lazio from Monte Cavo. There is no univocal version regarding the origin of the GBR acronym: some sources attribute it to the initials of the names of Gianni Del Piano and his - at the time - wife, Bianca, while others accredit it to the English initials of the colors of the logo ; l'Unità even attributed it to the Italian acronyms of "yellow, blue and red". The offices of the newly formed station were in Largo del Nazareno, where the registered office of Del Piano's commercial company was already located.GBR Radio broadcast on FM 102.5 Mhz from the top floor of the Hôtel Cavalieri Hilton in Monte Mario and made use of the collaboration of Ugo Porcelli, a RAI radio personality at the time, to recruit new voices who established themselves as entertainers and disc jockeys, including Federico Biagione, Milly Carlucci, Viviana Antonini and others. Already in 1976, however, Del Piano had oriented himself towards the more profitable television station, while the radio outlet - in the meantime renamed Antenna Italia - which, directed by Marcello Casco, had started syndication initiatives with various national operators including the Marcucci family, was gradually abandoned and effectively decommissioned at the beginning of the eighties. In 1982, the frequency was sold to Radio Radicale which, transmitting on 102.2, took the opportunity to unify the transmissions on 102.4 MHz on which it still broadcasts.
GBR TV, announced in July 1976 as Telestore Videocolor Service from the name of Del Piano's business and credited as the first privately owned color television station, began broadcasting on 1 August. It stood in a multifunctional structure called Spazio Parco at number 8062 in via Trionfale - near the fort of the same name - which housed, in addition to the ephemeral radio, also the recording studios for use by other radio and television broadcasters of the Marcucci group, owner of the area, and became the production center for its own news program, whose guide was called a young Franco Alfano who was one of the people who contributed to the network's notoriety even beyond the city sphere.
In 1977 GBR was the object of commercial interest by the pro-Christian Democratic entrepreneur Gaetano Rebecchini, who also boasted a mayor of Rome in his family branch, as the station showed ideological closeness to the largest government party of the time. Although the newborn station, not unlike many of its sisters in the local television airwaves, not only in Rome, had made a name for itself through the use of erotic night-time programming - broadcast after the end time of programs of films forbidden to minors under 18 when not directly self-produced striptease shows were regularly subject to complaint and judicial censure for outraging public decency - at a later stage the station distance itself from the cliché of a private station seeking notoriety only through the negative publicity of its erotic scandals. Nonetheless, still in 1978, a hatha yoga program was aired - admittedly not very credible in the eyes of enthusiasts of the discipline - in which a young topless student performed the positions ordered by a master with clear Nordic or Anglo-Saxon features and a foreign accent.
On the generalist front, however, the schedule presented a mix of young promises such as Viviana Antonini alongside well-known artists such as Franco Latini, with her involved in an entertainment show aimed at children; Michele Gammino, host of a video quiz; Maurizio Arena, owner of a periodical column. Relatively recent productions that Rai no longer broadcast also appeared in the schedule, such as the well-known American television series My Friend Tony.
The Via Caetani scoop
GBR's leap in quality occurred in conjunction with the last moments of one of the darkest episodes in the history of the Republic, the kidnapping and assassination of Aldo Moro, president of the Christian Democrats at the time, by the Red Brigades.Around midday on 9 May 1978, Video Giornale director Franco Alfano was alerted by telephone by his colleague Giorgio Laskaraky from Il Tempo of the presence of a suspicious vehicle and bomb squad in via Michelangelo Caetani, a street in the center of Rome near Largo di Torre Argentina and a side street of via delle Botteghe Oscure, the headquarters of the then Italian Communist Party. Alfano hurriedly went to the scene, arranging, via the radio telephone with which his car was equipped, to open the live television broadcast and to have a cameraman on site. Once he reached via Caetani he managed to force the first security cordon made up of financiers, while even Paolo Frajese's RAI crew arrived too late to approach. Once he passed he found Valerio Leccese - the closest of the camera operators to intervene - with whom he entered a building and went up to the first floor, convincing the doorman not to send them away and gaining a privileged observation point through a window overlooking the scene of the bomb squad who were working on the Renault 4 in whose trunk the body of Aldo Moro actually turned out to be found. Leccese began filming, documenting all the operations of discovery and identification of the body while Alfano transmitted the chronicle of the events by voice.
Bruno Vespa later wrote that he considered it "a strong professional slap" to have been beaten to the punch by a local television. Alfano said that that same evening he had received compliments from Frajese for the scoop, who however on the occasion declared himself not convinced that the doorman in via Caetani had allowed the GBR crew access to the building without obtaining any compensation. Alfano himself, a year later, joined Rai and became deputy director of TG2 and general director of San Marino TV.
Not having its own service, Rai asked for the video recording of the live broadcast, which GBR granted to it free of charge with the only condition that the image of its logo remained clearly visible, at the bottom right, which was then broadcast on all the state broadcaster's news programs, giving the network national notoriety.
The sociologist Fausto Colombo, in his 2012 work Il paese leggero, identifies this episode as a watershed in the history of mass communication in Italy, i.e. the definitive transition from bureaucratic and institutional information linked to a few officially recognized centers - RAI, the major press, typical of the pre-reform scenario of 1975 in which control over television broadcasting was governmental and not parliamentary - to a direct one whose production is competitive, no longer required to submit to rights of primogeniture of pre-existing subjects: from that moment on, the first to break the news regardless of his rank and past would win the information race.
The golden period
In the very early 1980s, Del Piano resumed contact with the Marcuccis, who in the meantime had launched Elefante, a syndication project owned by Tele Urbe in the capital, and who were planning the creation of the first national platform with content provided directly by the individual consortium of television stations through their new Canale 2000 brand, launched in 1982. GBR, with its two historic UHF channels, 33 and 47, was part of this consortium and in the intentions of the Marcuccis and Del Piano the Roman broadcaster should have been one of the most important of the new channel, so much so that it was hypothesized that this, when fully operational, should have taken the name of GBR Canale 2000. However, the project ended in nothing and on 31 March 1984 it was definitively abandoned with the closure of Canale 2000 and the birth, on those same frequencies, of Videomusic from an idea of the young Marcucci heir, Marialina.At that point, Del Piano had completely lost involvement with the station, which also abandoned the headquarters in via Trionfale to downsize to smaller premises near via Veneto and faced a financial crisis resolved by the intervention of Vincenzo Balzamo, treasurer of the Socialist Party, who took over GBR to sell it to Cine TV Roma Srl, a company close to the PSI. The new ownership installed the Roman Ania Pieroni, who had been romantically linked to Bettino Craxi as the director of the channel for a few years. The new director moved the television headquarters to Parioli, in via Panama 11, in the immediate vicinity of Piazza Unità, and, as requested, managed to design a high-profile program ensuring reliable presenters: Gianni Ippoliti, for example, created and hosted an ante-litteram talent show for the network, Provini, which a few years later he brought to Rai with the same name.
Furthermore, taking advantage of the fact of coming from a Roman bourgeoisie family, Pieroni managed to bring into the studio, often without compensation, well-known names of society and culture such as the architect Paolo Portoghesi and his wife Giovanna Massobrio, to whom he entrusted the management of a television salon together with Marta Marzotto in which personalities such as Adelina Tattilo, Lina Sotis, and Dario Beauty participated, and even unlikely names like Enrico Manca, president of Rai at the time, or of a competing company whose employees were prohibited from accepting invitations to appear on other broadcasting companies without permission.ref name="Manca" /> Other names destined for notoriety in their respective professional sectors include Monica Leofreddi, editor of a sports column, the psychologist Maria Rita Parsi, the future Rai journalist Alda D'Eusanio, the presenter Enrico Papi; this assortment of personalities and variety of programs meant that GBR became the first private Roman television in terms of audience.
The entry into the Cinquestelle syndication network in 1988 also contributed to ensuring the circulation of programs throughout the peninsula, which guaranteed a centralization of advertising revenues through Sipra and the exploitation of part of the Rai repertoire through Sacis.