Lemon curdle

In those soppy, not-so-Wild-West series such as Little House on the Prairie, it was not unusual for the woman of the house to appear at the door of her abode, pot and wooden spoon in hand, calling her folks in to dinner, which of course meant supper.

This week we had much the same thing going on, albeit in a not altogether different context.

It is probably the first time that spoonbills have spent more than a day in Malta, said the commentator. And sure enough, the inevitable happened, where the said inevitable was definitely not a 24-hour watch on the Ghadira Nature Reserve ('shoot to kill' would have been a tad too much on the other side of the fence...). Rather, the comment was a carte blanche invitation to trigger-happy persons to visit said reserve with disdain for the law and malice aforethought.

I have often had the occasion to point out how irresponsible those who are 'in charge' of bringing us the news sometimes are. This is yet another case in point.

I have also had occasion to comment about whether the Data Protection Act counts when it comes to filming children, in whatever circumstances.

Let us, for the sake of argument, suppose that the Xarabank team interviews children about their television preferences, and about the pre-bedtime rituals in their homes.

Are the parents of these (non-adult) children going to be shown the clips before they go on air?

If the Qalbinnies team likewise decides to visit a school and get the pupils' views on anything from best friends to pets, will the parents, likewise, be allowed to stop any telling information from going on air?

Jut asking, that's all.

When Albert Marshall was at the helm of PBS, many people 'blamed' him for the loss incurred by the company - which had partly come about because he had had a very sane bee in his bonnet about the production of local productions for the Station of the Nation.

Yes, well; the company does not appear to have recouped the losses it made, although the aforementioned local productions may or may not have appeared onscreen, depending upon the way one looks at things. So, as an aside, if Radju Bronja is taken off air, the chances are that our television licences will not get a pro rata discount.

Ghada Jisbah Ukoll is the latest drama to hit TVM screens; it is, however, not an in-house job.

From what I gathered, having watched parts of the first episode last Monday, it's basically a wholesome Grande Fratello scenario, with the people in it being 'allowed' to interact with the outside world.

I will rephrase that: freshly resurrected from the dire final scenes in L-Ispetteur Lowell, my childhood ex-neighbour Karen Magro stars as Tereza, a (newly single?) woman who takes paying guests in order to make full use of her superb, sprawling townhouse, giving a new slant to the phrase 'working from home'.

Her daughter Martina (Elaine Saliba in top form) has literary aspirations (don't we all?) and she conveniently has a friend working in a (local) radio station who, in her morning version of the Midnight Talker show (she answers letters rather than taking calls) reads the teenager's works in her dulcet voice... whose programme, in its turn, provides the link between a number of the different characters in the story.

There is a mixture of old - not chronologically so - and new faces, and the acting is way above good, with the plot, I am told, being a Gorg Peresso revamp of a Pupi Avati telenovela. The whole package is the long-promised production by the Media Centre TV Unit.

I never crease to wonder at how Super One and Net Television can come up with nearly totally different news bulletins for any given day, with the items that are featured in both being given, again, a totally different slant.

This week, however, we had the opportunity to look at things from a different angle.

An item in several Italian bulletins had a man telling us how his aged mother was shunted from the waiting room of one hospital to that of another, and another, triage systems notwithstanding, because there were no available beds; and the last ambulance journey was one too much for her.

On the other hand, Super One told us, somewhat pointlessly, that 'the government' had not made provisions for the number of persons who would be taken ill this winter, and therefore, two-bedded rooms were hosting double that number of patients; there were beds lining corridors, medical staff were overworked, and so forth.

Did the intrepid reporters ask the relatives of the 'extra' patients whether they would rather their loved ones were sent back home to wait for an available bed, just so that we could have a different slant on the story? If they did, I must have missed the coverage. I know what I would have preferred, way back.

The new PBS TVM logo and signature tune have recently appeared over serene backgrounds that may be termed head in the clouds or pie in the sky. Net relayed an intervista mal-mikrofoni taghna.

Naqra batuti said the hapless teacher of Maltese, as he was regaled with "pass" or "don't know" answers by his students in KwizzMalti.

Understatement of the century, I thought - until I realised that it was a re-screening of the first series. I would have thought that a second series, with captions accorded to the faces of Maltese writers dancing on the screen, was way overdue, with better prepared teens; showing repeats of the first one is merely a waste of airtime.