TO 90 years from birth, Sky Documentaries celebrates the great Gianfranco Funari tonight at 9.15 pm – the television star born in Rome on 21 March 1932 who died in 2008 at the age of 76 – with the documentary Funari Funari Funari.
A lucid and honest work that analyzes lights and shadows of a brilliant and controversial character. Making good use of interviews, unpublished videos and archive images, Funari Funari Funari is a journey between television studios and private life that pays homage in a heartfelt way one of the symbolic faces of the television of the 80s and 90s. An impetuous, provocative and in his own way revolutionary character.
Gianfranco Funari: the documentary
Rising to prominence in the early 1980s, Funari has created and perfected over the years a new formula for making television, applied to politics and current affairs. Opening in fact the path of infotainment, a dominant format today on every channel. And that he does his own with a management style made up of colorful, deliberately excessive tones and (to its detractors) vulgar and populist.
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After an adventurous life like croupier in casinoswhich takes him to Singapore, Funari made his debut on the small screen at the age of forty carving out an important role in the then newborn Telemontecarlo. His program With open mouth – a pioneering talk show made up of ordinary people – makes him famous and takes him straight in Rai, in 1983. Where it breaks through with several broadcasts, including Noon is ….
Its role is not limited to that of a simple neutral conductor, but is that of a showman who fearlessly expresses his opinions, always directly and vehemently, often taking uncomfortable positions. It becomes like this a real pop iconbeloved by the public (and by the broadcast Blob) but massacred by critics.
Success in the 90s and decline
The rise in Rai, however, is not only roses and flowers. His being allergic to impositions in fact leads him to making enemies almost everywhere. Especially when it invites on broadcast some politicians unwelcome at the top of the company. This is the case of Giorgio La Malfa’s guest in 1990, an episode that causes him the removal from Rai.
So he arrives at Fininvest (later Mediaset) – where riding the Mani Pulite wave becomes a sort of “people’s megaphone”treating (always with his Trastevere attitude) the thorniest political and social issues in the country in broadcasts such as Italian midday And Funari News.
Even this time, however, it is not long in coming clash with executives of the company, to which I sign another departure. With two excommunications in his pocket, Funari is therefore ousted from the six main channels.
The last years of his career will be a succession of projects that have never been realized, forays into cinema and theater and new experiments on niche TV channels such as Odeon TV and Antenna 3 Lombardia. Where he conducts his latest broadcasts together with his third wife Morena Zapparoli.
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Fatigued by severe physical problemsbut always on the side of citizens’ problems, in 2007 he experiences a moment of rebirth when the then director of Rai 1 Fabrizio Del Noce calls him to occupy the band of Saturday evening with Apocalypse Show. But times have changed and the Funari style It no longer has the scratch it once did.
The share is indeed merciless – the lowest rate recorded by Rai 1 in prime time up to that point. A disappointment that aggravates his already precarious health conditions. The blackberry comes the following year, at 76 years old. A lot of ordinary people and a handful of colleagues attend his funeral, just as he would have liked.
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