Only their chains

I don't know about 1956, which Fr Victor Grech quotes as the year he started broadcasting on Rediffusion. Dun Victor was certainly not on Rediffusion when I was appointed head of programmes in 1966. I had known him ever since I was a child because his parents lived down the road from us in Zejtun. By the time I took over programming Dun Victor had already become a national personality through his social work and for people in difficulty, a much sought-after priest for advice.

I called him in and offered him a weekly programme which I titled Fejn Tmur il-Qalb. Since that day Dun Victor has offered his weekly advice on air uninterruptedly for decades although he has changed the title of the programme twice I believe.

I find it nothing short of the type of arrogance that at PBS comes out of the walls like mould and that passing years leave unaffected to suggest that Dun Victor should have applied to keep his decades-long programme in the schedule. It seems to me that because this busy priest, who has so much more to attend to in addition to his weekly programme, did not go to PBS to grovel at someone's feet, his programme suddenly became expendable. Fr Joe Borg has now advised him to apply for the January schedule. I am sure that Dun Victor is a wiser man than that.

Now that Dun Victor has been snapped up by RTK I strongly suggest to him that he stays there. With him will go his vast audience of young and older listeners to whom he unselfishly imparts the good word.

I wish to take this opportunity also to salute all those PBS professionals who have been pushed out and the scores of writers and producers whose works have been discarded by Fr Joe, Dominic Fenech and a psychiatrist.

Among the true professionals, who no one on the board of PBS had the wherewithal to appreciate, is Anna Bonanno. Miss Bonanno has been transferred to the Department of Information where she will obviously be engaged in non-broadcasting work. Broadcasting is what Miss Bonanno has always shown great flair for and to which she dedicated her life. She started with me at Radju ta' Malta 3 which I initiated along with Radio ta' Malta 1 and Radju ta' Malta 2 as chief executive of the Broadcasting Authority between 1971 and 1973. While the other two stations in the Maltese language were 18-hour a day stations, Radju ta' Malta 3 was a 10-hour station in the Italian language which Miss Bonanno controlled as well as programmed and announced in, in her impeccable Italian. It is a pity that, in this desert of good professionals in the field, the meritorious continue to be discarded for the better connected.

I hope that, in my time, people like Miss Bonanno, like Fr Victor and a host of other seasoned professionals who have been set aside and who have now left radio and television will be vindicated. With them the hundreds of TV writers and producers who swallowed the bait of submitting their works in good faith for the October schedule and who have only a three-line rejection letter to show for their troubles. Most of the new schedule is nothing but regurgitated old hat.

It is to the immense credit of those who have been pushed out of their jobs at PBS that Minster Austin Gatt's office is the only place that the hatchet men at PBS can go to for refuge. No one who has any knowledge of the broadcasting business, except those who have now virtually taken over the national broadcasting station and who are paid handsomely, will give them the light of day.

I am afraid the broadcasters have no one to blame but themselves. Writers, producers, ex-PBS staff, actors and actresses, lighting men and women, cameramen, soundmen, set designers and everyone else without whom radio and television in this country will starve to death should already have joined hands and started the fight for their rights. They have absolutely nothing to lose but their chains.