Could there have been a better choice for Lawrence Gonzi’s chummy dress-down politician’s-day-out 100% cotton sweater?
I’m saying lilac just isn’t his colour. If you have seen the PN’s new billboards, which are armed with the slogan ‘Iva, Flimkien Kollox Huwa Possibli’, people’s prime minister Lawrence Gonzi is decked in a comfy looking lilac sweater, engaged in heart-warming chit-chat with families and the elderly. No sign of his Cabinet colleagues: for the PN this election is down to whether voters can trust Sant with a new government.
So what’s wrong with lilac? It’s a bit hard to answer. But let’s say it’s like asking, what’s wrong with Al Qaeda – and you instantly conjure up a towering inferno of smoke and fire, or limbs flying all around the Basra bazaar. I’m the same with guys who wear pink. I can hate men at the sight of their new pink sweatshirt, especially the ones with turned-up collars and aviator sunglasses who look like commandoes trying to storm the Mattel workshop where Barbie dolls are manufactured. The pinkahadeens.
I’m not much of a dresser – I look inside my wardrobe and there’s some brown and dark greens, fusty boring colours. I’m a lazy shopper. But show me pink, and well, you like dressing up like gingivitis or a three-month-old baby. Great, you’re a fashionable guy who left his brain outside on Republic Street while you popped inside the shop to fetch yourself a new colour that will make your man-tits look like two blobs of bubble-gum.
The problem with lilac (pink’s deformed cousin) is its softening quality. Maybe the sweater was just a harmless purchase for Gonzi, but it is also a likely after-effect of the great big pink revolution of 2007, where breast cancer awareness turned pink into the sickening everyday colour of its noble mission. This newspaper even used shocking pink every now and then, usually as a colour denoting festive ribaldry, or the camp and the outrageous. Because that’s what pink is, a colour which even in its most ironic and jocose uses, denotes effeminacy and effeteness.
And there can be no greater shock when comparing Sarkozy’s ‘Ensemble, Tout Devient Possible’ campaign ad with Gonzi’s copycat billboard: one is a stern-looking French statesman, ramrod-straight in his dark suit, hawkish gaze like a searchlight picking out Parisian third-generation immigrants dressed in hoodies. The other is Gonzi, showing the people what a nice chap he is. He’s even wearing a lilac sweater. Now, that surely must mean he is nice.

If you do happen to be keen about the small details, The Times on Wednesday (30 January) failed to make a celebratory remark about none other than one of its own journalists being appointed to the challenging posting as Head of News at PBS.
Snuggled inside the last remaining inches on page 17 (far away from the main news items) was the news that Natalino Fenech, one of the Times’ longest serving journalists, had accepted to become PBS editor. Not even a tiny mugshot, or some Christmas party snapshot. Fenech’s appointment was treated like an announcement that the missions will be collecting used stamps to reverse Angola’s worsening GDP.
To think that only that same morning, a dozen hours before Fenech’s move to PBS was announced in the evening bulletins, that the Times’ cantankerous leader opined with raised forefinger and bellowing timbre that (clearing of the throat), ‘No news manager is bad news’.
“Ideally,” the Times’ leader ran, “a suitable candidate should be found immediately to fill the post of registered editor and news manager. Past experience and cumbersome recruiting mechanisms make this quite unrealistic, at least for a few weeks. An ad hoc solution has, therefore, to be found, especially with an impending election.”
Of course, who better than one of our own journalists, it should have continued. Bugger those “cumbersome recruiting mechanisms” – what are they called – calls for applications? Yeah, those silly selection processes with CVs and interviews. Isn’t meritocracy a drag? Thank heavens for ad hoc solutions. After all this is only the public broadcaster. Let’s have a piss on camera one.

I can understand why people like Alfred Sant are going to be peeved about PBS being turned into a “propaganda machine”. Since its transformation into a black hole of mediocrity and farmed-out nonsense, mainly at the able hands of government and General Workers Union negotiators who happily chopped through the entire workforce of the station, PBS has been nothing but yet another fantastical product of the government’s ideological plummet into mindless privatisation. PBS is not private of course, but let’s say it isn’t that public either. The chairmen whom Austin Gatt appointed don’t stand to take the heat (Austin Sammut, Michael Mallia, Andrew Agius Muscat); the chairmen on the editorial board follow suit (Fr Joe Borg and John Camilleri); and the editorial board and PBS directors are locked in a battle over who calls the shots; Francis Zammit Dimech, minister responsible for its public service mission, namely a Lm500,000 budget for current affairs and cultural programmes, is nowhere to be seen.
In the meantime, we get to enjoy mindless daytime TV programmes to hear the same old drivel from entertainers who struggle to speak Maltese, who think that sweating like pigs over a cooking hob makes really great TV, and to hear callers complain about their in-growing toenails to priests. Fantastic! And it’s Friday night, and the hot topic of the evening is Angelik Caruana, a man who claims he sees the Virgin Mary. If you think this is what public broadcasting should be offering us, then I wouldn’t trust you with a teaspoon in your hands. Enjoy it.