He will depart at the end of the month after hosting four Sanremo festivals and creating long-lasting and successful programs such as Quelli che… il calcio and Che tempo che fa.
The announcement of Fabio Fazio’s move from Rai to Discovery, in which he has signed a four-season contract, marks the end of a piece of public television history that has spanned over forty years. In fact, Fazio made his debut as a copycat on a Rai radio show in 1982, and a year later he made his television debut. Since then he has remained with public television for almost all of his life, apart from brief stints first with Telemontecarlo and then with La7. And over those forty years he has been the face of hugely successful shows, including four editions of the Sanremo Festival.
Che tempo che fa, his current programme, has been on the air since 2003 and Fazio will host two more episodes until May 28th. Rai’s split was partly predictable as his contract expires on June 30 and in recent months, especially following the right-wing victory in September’s general election, renewal has seemed complicated. Fazio is known to have progressive views and has been heavily criticized over the years by politicians who now hold important roles in government, such as Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni and most notably Matteo Salvini, leader of the League and Minister of Transport.
Today’s newspapers report that there have been no contacts between Rai’s management and Fazio’s agents to extend the contract for more than three months. However, there are conflicting versions of the possible responsibilities of the board of directors (BO) and the outgoing managing director Carlo Fuortes. Fuortes announced his resignation a week ago – also because of differences with the current government – and announced that the board would not allow contracts to be approved beyond August 31, essentially shifting the responsibility to members of the government for advice. However, Rai president Marinella Soldi denied this, saying it was Fuortes who did not want to commit to any decisions beyond that date.
On Sunday on the show, Fazio hinted that the current political climate influenced the split, but said that he and Luciana Littizzetto, the show’s historical partner, who will accompany him to Discovery, “have no calling to identify themselves as victims or victims.” to feel like a martyr”.
I’ve been in Rai for forty years but one can’t be for all seasons, or at least I don’t think I am. (…) If I ever say something rude about Rai, it’s like saying it against me, because Rai is 70 years old and of those 70 years I’ve spent 40 with me and I with her. And so we’re kind of the same.
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“If I ever say something rude, it’s like saying it against me because Rai is 70 years old and out of those 70 years I’ve spent 40 with me and I with her. Thank you to the entire audience, we’ll see you again anyway.”
– @fafazio To #CTCF pic.twitter.com/eYelV0ehaR
— Che Tempo Che Fa (@chetempochefa) May 14, 2023
Fazio began his career in Rai very young, nineteen, with roles as an impersonator and shoulder brace in various shows. He made his television debut in Raffaella Carrà’s Pronto Raffaella, a program directed by Gianni Boncompagni. He continued to impersonate television personalities and politicians in various comedy and entertainment programs on Rai, Odeon TV and Telemontecarlo. In the second half of the ’80s he became the presenter of some programs aimed at young people, such as Estate Disco 1986 (music program born after the success of the festival bar) or Jeans, conducted with Moana Pozzi. In the early ’90s he conceived and hosted the game show Porca Miseria, late night on Rai3, for two seasons, a housekeeping format that left some families struggling to make ends meet.
Fazio was just 29 years old when he invented, wrote and hosted the show that would enormously increase his popularity: “Quelli che…il calcio”, which transformed classic Sunday television programming with a format based on Serie A league games, but did not contain pictures of games . It first aired on Rai 3 from 1993 to 1998 and then on Rai 2. The setting given by Fazio was light-hearted, with a strong comic component and with some regular characters, such as Sister Paola, a Lazio fan, Gambian Juventus player Idris, or Dutch astrologer Peter Van Wood. Invented cartoon characters who, alongside other characters already known but placed in a different context, became the protagonists of a commentary that began by cheering on their respective football teams. Fazio’s tenure lasted until 2001.
In the meantime, however, he had also experimented with other formulas. In 1997, he co-hosted Anima Mia with Claudio Baglioni, a 1970s prime-time revival that was considered one of the first successful shows mainly based on nostalgia: it became the most-watched show in Rai 2 history (later surpassed by ). Isola dei Famous), which led Fazio to also conduct the Sanremo Festival in 1999 and 2000. On this occasion, too, Fazio accompanied himself and intervened seemingly out of context characters, such as the Nobel Prize in Medicine Renato Dulbecco or the last President of the Soviet Union, Mikhail Gorbachev, who was a guest on the show.
In 2001, there was Rai’s first farewell: Fazio wanted to host a late-night American-style talk show and was offered that opportunity by La7, a then-just-formed network that aspired to join the Rai-Mediaset duopoly at. At the beginning of September, a few days before the start, the program was canceled for reasons that were never really clarified: Fazio left the company and received 28 billion lire (about 18 million euros today) in penalties and severance payments.
He returned to Rai to host Che tempo che fa, a show that has been broadcast by all three major Rai TV channels in almost twenty years. The format includes some regular guests, including the actress and comedian Luciana Littizzetto since 2005, and interviews with national and international guests, often at the highest level. Along with actors, directors, singers and writers attending the release of their films, records or books, Fazio interviewed personalities such as Bill Gates, Tony Blair, Barack Obama, Emmanuel Macron and Pope Francis, among others.
During these years, in addition to Che tempo che fa, Fazio also hosted some shorter and more episodic programs on Rai, such as the four episodes of Come Away with Me with writer Roberto Saviano, a kind of theatrical show that had great success and sparked some political controversy. In 2013 and 2014 he returned to direct the Sanremo Festival together with Luciana Littizzetto. In 2016 he also ran a new edition of the Rischiatutto quiz.
With Luciana Littizzetto on the stage of the Ariston Theater on the last night of the 2013 Sanremo Festival
His hosting style and ability to interview guests with grace and calm became his trademark and one of the reasons guests tended to accept invitations. But it also happened that Fazio was criticized precisely for his politeness and composure, which was sometimes felt to be exaggerated, as well as for a certain vagueness in the questions or for being too close to the interlocutor. Fazio in particular has been criticized recently for the February 2022 interview with Pope Francis, which highlighted the lack of questions on sexual abuse cases in the Catholic Church, in Italy and abroad.
In any case, despite the declared intention to address a broad and transcending public, Fazio has over the years become the subject of harsh personal attacks from right-wing parties, notably from Matteo Salvini but also from the Movimento 5 Stelle, which was often the case criticized the high salaries Fazio received from Rai. When the Court of Auditors filed an inquiry into his salary in 2019, Fazio said it was the “apparent end” after “years of lynching” and that the filing certainly hadn’t undone the damage to his image.
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