Italy Plans an Electronic Invasion of Poland, With the Pope’s Blessing

A delegation from RAI, Italy’s state-owned radio and television network, went to Warsaw last month to discuss a plan to transmit one of RAI’s three TV channels to Poland, live each day in Italian, for the usual 18 hours or so. Nothing, they say here, will be censored or excluded for the Polish viewer.

Officially this seemingly crackpot idea originated with the Poles. The Italians caught up in the plan are enthusiastic. Perhaps within the breast of every democratic civil servant lies a natural impulse to play the benign colonialist.

The technical issues to be resolved are not insurmountable from the Italian side. So far, they only involve money, such as the cost of the satellite, the cost of that dish on a Warsaw roof and perhaps the cost of laying some high-quality telephone lines.

Italy, as it happens, is one of the most generous deliverers of aid to developing nations. Those here who pay nearly $100 a year for a license to watch the three RAI channels will probably not squawk. Albania and Malta already pick up the RAI channels gratis, and they are not part of the “family.” Poland, it turns out, now is.

Since Cardinal Karol Wojtyla of Krakow emerged on St. Peter’s balcony in 1978 as Pope John Paul II, little by little a special relationship has been mutually fostered between Italy and Poland. The Polish Pope’s forceful personality has played its part. In the past two years, some 60,000 Poles, including entire young families, have come to Rome on “religious pilgrimages” with the intention of staying on as transit immigrants. They are rather costly guests of the Italian treasury while they await the hoped-for immigrant visa to North America or Australia.

It is no secret that the projected daily TV linkup between Rome and Warsaw is a notion “dear to the heart of the Holy Father,” as they like to put it in the Vatican.

That Gen. Wojciech Jaruzelski has been loosening up virtually everything in Poland, except his own unfortunate ramrod public image, has been welcome news in Italy for some time. But to expose the Poles to 18 hours of Italian television a day?

Since so much of the material on TV is American-made, is the general seeking to encourage greater emigration? The RAI commercials, set in an Italian supermarket, may be paid for by Cirio tomato paste, but the Polish housewife may focus her attention on the shelves laden with other goodies, on the Armani dress Mrs. Average Shopper is wearing or on the clothes the baby in the shopping cart is wearing (he will appear in a later slot plugging disposable diapers).

RAI’s first channel is controlled by the Christian Democrat Party, the second channel by the Socialists and the third by the Communists. The first channel is the one that gives the Pope his most extended coverage. Its American morning series now is called “The Green Hornet,” which, from the hair styles, looks to be 20 years old. Walt Disney productions--such as the recently shown “Toby Tyler,” a 1960 film starring Charles Bronson--seem safe enough for an Iron Curtain country, even though “Toby” is about freedom to join circuses.

There are at least 15 hours of soccer each week, lots of other sports, figure-skating competitions, 90-minute-long political round-tables, phone-in quiz shows and the national weekly lottery drawing.

The Italian lottery could conceivably lead to a Polish clandestine-numbers racket, based on the numbers drawn here.

About once a week Channel 1 shows a daring film, such as Marlene Dietrich and Gary Cooper in “Morocco,” with some torrid (for 1930) love scenes--dubbed, of course, into Italian. Poland and Italy are in the same time zone, and these adult films do not start until after midnight. They could have an adverse effect on Polish productivity in factories, perhaps even in bedrooms.

If this Warsaw-Rome entente cordiale becomes a fact, there’s a good chance that it might turn out to be the greatest Polish joke on us all. The Poles will receive the technically excellent Italian channel at no cost to them (who pays the films’ foreign copyright owners?), but actual transmission could be delayed at the discretion of the Polish authorities, allowing time for a little receiver-censorship, and there could be occasional “regrettable technical breakdowns.”

The two countries, Italy and Poland, will be drawn closer together. Every Polish teen-ager will be singing Italian chart-toppers.

Newly rich Italy, with its burgeoning economy, will feel that it must do something more, financially, for its good Polish cousins, with whom one can talk soccer or songs--and that matters. More government-funded luxuries will soon be on the way. And it won’t be only pizza.

Then if RAI TV reaches every Polish home, the Italians will have achieved more in the 40-year airwave propaganda war than the U.S. Information Agency, Radio Free Europe or the Voice of America put together. They shouldn’t mind that.