Last Laughs
Hyena having a laugh
Being rather more used to the cartoon variety than to the real thing, our Anglo-Saxon readers will probably react to the idea of Iena ridens – the laughing hyena – with the mental picture of a highly amused dog. Italy, once a minor African colonial power, thinks of these animals in a somewhat different way, one associated with evil and the powers of darkness.
However that is, the image, laughter included of course, has for some time been co-opted by a very successful television “infotainment” program here called “Le Iene”, “The Hyenas,” built mostly around ambush interviews of well-known personalities who tend to react badly. That is the fun part, watching, say, the (now ex) Governor of the Bank of Italy – (here) – inviting his minders to “thump” the intrusive interviewer and so on.
Beyond that, the show is well written and its willingness to go beyond proper politesse is often refreshing. About a year ago, for instance, its authors had the clever idea of secretly “swabbing” unsuspecting Italian parliamentarians and then running drug tests on the samples so obtained.
Of the fifty honorable members of Parliament they managed to trap, 12 turned out to have recently smoked a cannabis derivative – marijuana or hashish – and another four were positive to cocaine. In either case the drugs had been assumed within the preceding 36 hours.
Not too surprisingly, this never did actually get broadcast since the country’s “Privacy Authority” found that would have been equivalent to releasing data about the health of private individuals, something forbidden by law.
Criminal charges were also brought for having used illegal means to collect the “sensitive data.” Some of the charges collapsed when it was shown that the method used in fact obtained highly reliable results, but the whole thing was finally found to be “illicit” and, with amazing speed for a judicial system that on average requires about a dozen years to reach a final verdict in a civil case, one of the show’s authors and a journalist have now been found guilty of making politicians look silly and hypocritical – well, actually, for having violated the national privacy law.
Both were sentenced to five months and ten days in prison. In plea bargaining, this was commuted to a fine whose value has not been made public, but which certainly amounts to spare change if measured against the marvelous publicity all this has brought to the show.
The astonishingly sleazy image of the Italian Parliament and Italian politics in general has, naturally, come off somewhat worse – an issue we’ve already touched on in various places, especially (here) if this is something that concerns you.