•
Rating:
I know, I am such a nostalgia buff that I disgust myself, I get sentimental about every idiocy even from a month ago. What can I do… Sensitivity, lack of desire to truly face tomorrow? I have no idea. Sometimes after turning 30, you often get this realization that you haven't quite grasped the exact metric of the age you're living. You have a new house, a partner, a car that’s decent enough for the average petty bourgeois dignity, a job (not particularly fulfilling but still a job). Everything around changes and renews to appear "trendy" and up-to-date, from cars to clothes, from music to everyday accessories, and with a touch of melancholy, you find yourself missing even the most trivial nonsense you had your hands on ten or twenty years ago. Then you think back to some pleasant episode related to the period when the object in question became part of your life and you get teary-eyed, for what then? To discover that you were younger, sillier (perhaps), and more naive than today? When I dust off the vinyl records, I sometimes come across the old 33 records of various "Fivelandia" and the 45 records of the theme songs, which catapult me back in a time machine, back to the mid-'80s, when naivety was truly the habitual characteristic of the period I was living.
Maybe some very young people reading this now aren't aware of a program that set a milestone in the collective imagination for many of my generation. It's not really a review if we want to tell the truth, but a tribute to a friend of my afternoons when you didn't always go out to the church soccer field and not even to the bar to put the 200 lire in the video game or to take painstaking rides on a bicycle with schoolmates (the weather wasn't always nice), back and forth and up and down, for those living in the hills like me, through the ancient streets of the native village. The period I specifically recall spans between 1984 and 1990. A duo made up of a very sweet Licia Colò and an absurd Paolo Bonolis. Between them, a grotesque hairy pink candy with long cocker spaniel ears and huge cyclamen-colored eyelashes, which made Elio look smooth and bright like the outside of a toilet. Now forget that somewhat cheeky and sometimes arrogant billionaire who hosts "Ciao Darwin" and "Il senso della vita" and imagine a charming young man a little over twenty, with a checkered shirt, wavy hair, an apparently unlucky and sometimes cowardly look, in a colorful room with cubes, markers, and giant notebooks as a backdrop, endlessly called "Piolo" by that bizarre talking pink dog named Uan, characterized by an absurdly somewhat hoarse falsetto voice. The result: "Bim Bum Bam", a children's program, run by a fantastic team that with intelligence, irony, and an extraordinary ability never to fall into embarrassing double entendres, managed to babysit millions of children for over 10 years. In 1985, the baton passed from Licia to the legendary Manu (Manuela Blanchard), so the new trio, in a convincing and alchemical collaboration, triumphantly carried us through to 1989 without missing a season. Now that I think about it, Bim Bum Bam also started keeping us company on Sunday mornings shortly after the arrival of Manuela. The skits were fantastic: parodies in episodes, from "Piolocky" ("Rocky") to "Uanatan" ("Johnatan Adventure Dimension", a documentary by the late Ambrogio Fogar), thundering out-of-frame vocal incursions by the "Director Lady", alias "Brandolin" (alias someone who was really in the production room) who with the earthquake effect of the camera, would vehemently call the Fantozzian Bonolis, guilty of some childish prank pulled with Uan. Not to be forgotten was the mail corner towards the end of the broadcast, with some letters from the little viewers, read by the hosts and the very amusing video sigles shot at Gardaland, with the park's big clock pointing to 4 during the opening theme and 6 during the closing one. Everything was a backdrop for the airing (already carried out by mommy RAI and some small private broadcasters in the late '70s) of the wonderful and historic cartoons "made in Japan" that filled our cathode tube box in that decade. Now that I think about it, Bim Bum Bam also started keeping us company on Sunday mornings about shortly after Manuela joined. Piolo left in 1990, after having teamed with some other young hosts (Roberto, Carlo, Debora, and Carlotta) in his last season, and Manu would make sporadic appearances in almost all editions. I still remember some honorable seasons with the puppet Ambrogio, then I too began to fade, having already finished middle school in '93. In the following years, I happened to glance and watched year after year, the exhausting invasion of every type of advertisement, fake prize competitions organized in teams to promote board games, promotions for amusement parks, to the inexorable advent of technology with the sponsorship of annoying paid SMS to receive nonsense drawings or the idiotic-kid phrase of the week, authentic fodder for children and teenagers, victims of the ever more greedy and Machiavellian commercial TVs, but I had also noticed that good old Uan and various puppets had been gone for quite a while. It must have been between 2000 and 2005, I don't want to speak blasphemies, I even think the legendary logo written at the bottom had already been removed and also the former young hosts had sadly turned into "pseudo-Mastrota" to continue fattening the Mediaset piggybank, which has never again had the courtesy and good sense (never had any in the last 15 years..?) to decently replace in that time slot, that glorious little theater for the little ones.
From there, I understood that of that magical, carefree, and amusing afternoon entertainer of my eighties, there was now only a tender memory left for nostalgic fools like me. Yes, I know I should think about having a child… Ok, ok, I will certainly do it as soon as I find sense and some economic stability. I just regret that they'll never enjoy a Yo-Yo and a Billy juice (extinct snacks) in front of Bim Bum Bam.
The rating is clearly for the nostalgia of my innocent decade in question.
Loading comments slowly
