He is considered the father of Italian TV and today, if he were alive, he would be 100 years old. Mike Bongiorno, the real name is Michael Nicholas Salvatore Bongiorno, has become synonymous with “quiz”, game, public competition. Mike, as the viewers affectionately called him, inaugurated a format that is still very popular: the one in which one remains glued to the TV to check whether the protagonist, the competitor – part gladiator and part hero – makes it ago, he wins a lot of money and manages to change his life forever, or he doesn’t make it and loses, being relegated to oblivion. He entered the homes of Italians, into mass culture, precisely thanks to these prize quiz broadcasts and was a great entertainer thanks to a very particular gift that Aldo Grasso called the “courage of banality” or the “triumph of usual.” Ways to say that he furnished the imagination and the days of Italians, becoming like one of the family. His celebrity exploded immediately with the broadcast “Lascia ooppio” in 1955, an Italian remake of “The Sixty-Four Thousand Dollar Question”, which kept entire cities in front of the televisions and large screens of cinemas which were forced to change programming to allow viewers to follow him, Mike. At a certain point the program even becomes a film with Totò, and with Mike who is already a legend because he plays the role of himself in the film.
Mike Bongiorno, the father of Italian TV
He was a presenter, author, partisan, entertainer, writer. He was born in New York one hundred years ago: on 26 May 1924 from a Turin mother and an Italian-American father (Michelangelo Bongiorno, a Sicilian emigrant who would become president of the Italian-American association Sons of Italy in America and who would go on to run for mayor in New York against Fiorello La Guardia and Generous Pope). He won the Telegatto twenty times and presented eleven Sanremo festivals between 1963 and 1997, much more than a safe used one.
The great master of TV had moved to Turin after his parents’ divorce in the 1930s. He cultivated the dream of becoming a journalist and began collaborating with La Stampa. He lived through the end of the fascist regime and on 8 September he had to abandon his dreams as a journalist. He became a partisan relay fighting between the Piedmont plains and the mountains on the border with Switzerland. He was arrested by the Gestapo and also ended up in San Vittore prison where he was a cellmate of Indro Montanelli. He was also transferred to various German concentration camps where he saw, as he had said, “dozens of Jews heading towards the gas chambers”. He was saved thanks to a prisoner exchange and his American passport.
