With the Azzurri’s first match at the 2024 European Championships, Europlay debuted on Raiplay, a talk intended to be entertaining hosted by Michela Giraud, newsboy from Northern Rome (which, let’s remember, is like Vietnam). A lot of people, including ‘content creators’, very strong astrologers on Ig, chefs like Max Mariola and some sports journalists comment on the match, sharing the same sofa and speaking over the official commentary. Nothing is understood. And, perhaps, it’s for the best. Give us Gialappa’s!
SIf you are a football fan, you will find Europlay an unsustainable mess. If you’re not a football fan, too. The talk hosted on Raiplay by Michela Giraud debuted with the intention of commenting live on the first match of the Italian national team against Albania. The result, perhaps without any major surprises, has overflowed every limit of humanly sustainable nuisance. A small group of people (very followed on social media) gather and follow the match, with Giraud as hostess showing off her typical Northern Rome newsboy ways. Of her, after 150 minutes of disaster, we feel we can only save the way in which she continues to carry on the program despite the nonsense of almost everything around her. She doesn’t let herself be intimidated by chaos, she magnifies everything and everyone. Which is good. Wasted, but good. For the rest, cosmic nothingness. The concept of the format (?) is to throw individuals who make numerological sparks on social media onto a sofa to see the effect it has. The effect is alienating. The result is a ‘twitched’ one which, perhaps, would go unnoticed even on the mother platform. Let alone on that of Rai. The problems are multiple and already present on paper, inherent to the idea itself. Let’s go and show them off one by one, shouting ‘Aridatece la Gialappa’s!’.
PFirst problem: the cast, about ten people in all, talks over the commentators, perpetually. So if the viewer ever wanted to follow the match, they can’t. And what does he get in return? People chatting nonsense about tattoos, horoscopes and boni. All conversations as inane as they are difficult to hear because the Rai technical commentary on the match flows alongside them. So? And then the comedian Carlo Amleto, overall one of the least annoying presences of the gang, plays the pianola, remembering the remaining minutes or inciting the audience, divided in the stands between Albania fans and those of our national team, to sing “cori respectful”, in a “jazz” version. Meanwhile, chef Max Mariola is segregated in the kitchen behind the studio, intent on cooking up a typical dish of the rival team, the qofte (meatballs, ed.), with an inexplicable emphasis. Ours gets as excited as the mythological Roberto Da Crema, smelling and picking at peppers, friggitelli, spices and so on while Giaraud, to smell all the goodness, brushes our hair inside him. Bon appetit!
There’s Simone Carponi, over a million followers on Instagram, known in the bubble because he’s been making horoscopes in delightful Canva graphics for years now. In person, he has the same lightness, not to say evanescent impalpability. The Paolo Fox of the web makes it known that the Italian national team is of the sign of Capricorn. From this our stellar friend deduces concreteness and great defensive capacity. As soon as the sentence ends, we score the first goal. 28 seconds from kick-off. Carponi, evidently, had not foreseen this. Then Alessio Viola, one of the few actually entitled to be there as a journalist, stays all the time with a pillow in his arms: “I realized I have a belly, so at least I cover it.” Giraud intervenes: “Eh, doing this program from Naples doesn’t help: we get a kilo an hour!”. If nothing else, tycoon. Cheers.
ANDuroplay wants to replicate a friendly, domestic atmosphere, trying to give back to the spectator the same light-hearted warmth that, one imagines, these breathe from the sofa at home during the matches. He can’t. He doesn’t succeed because of the logorrhea of all the actors present in the studio, self-propelled and chatty vuvuzelas, always annoyingly enthusiastic, without a real reason. Meanwhile, a thought tugs at the heart of anyone with television taste: Gialappa’s Band is doing the same thing here and now, going live on Twitch and YouTube to comment on these European Championships. Gherarducci and Santin have guests of the caliber of Giancarlo Magalli and everything goes smoothly, without any glitches. Make way for the ‘young people’, let’s let them work, for goodness’ sake. However, and we hope that this aspect can become clear even where it is possible, transferring people with a huge following on social media to ‘TV’ is not enough to create a program that makes sense. Or that it might even just be pleasant, remotely edible. The two media, social media and television, are different and need equally different characters. Some incursions from the fabulous world of the ‘web’ are always welcome, but you can’t rely on a swarm of K-masters to justify the show. To make this show exist without feeling like a kick in the face. Let’s hope that Europlay is the right time to break such a curse. But, now having experienced years of ugliness, we cannot be optimistic about it. Shall we be patient?
