Elite?

Summer is the time of reruns, but this summer we also have several premieres. The first one took place on RTS, through the show "One Good Day", a daily talk show, where boy/girl presenter pairs alternate on weekdays in the manner of a Sunday afternoon. From 13:15 to XNUMX:XNUMX, i.e. during working hours, the spectators enjoy the endless weekend, "Rainbow", which extends throughout the week. This show has been planned for several years, we found out about it when the affair about the financing of external productions and public service employees, with considerable and inflated costs, was opened.

The editor of "Šarenica" said goodbye live to the crew and viewers a few weeks ago, and then it turned out that she had a strange arrangement with the Tourist Organization of Serbia. To tell the truth, she was hired as an external collaborator, but she allegedly produced articles with the resources of RTS and sold them to TOS. In short, in the middle of a series of affairs, who knows which reincarnation of the summer afternoon program appears on the trail of "Summer on Ada".

The show is, therefore, anything but new and original. The presenters are standard, the format is worn out, and domestic TV channels have been running the same time slot and format of the shows "150 minutes", "Ace at eleven", "Mi danas", "Puls Srbije", "Među nama" for years. This TV edition of "Vremena sport i razonode" only shows how the public service is increasingly unsuccessfully trying to copy the idealess projects of commercial television. In the case of this show, creativity was reduced to the formula "One good day", so we have "one good recipe for lunch", while in the studio we are entertained by "one good band" with domestic and foreign pop hits. This show was made to justify the cost of its preparation, which took a very, very long time. As far as I'm concerned, a much better move was made by the public service when it released digitally remastered cult domestic films, finally with perfect picture and sound, all thanks to Kinoteca and the A1 company.

The second premiere took place this week on the Euronews Serbia channel, in a format called "Unknown Europe". It is actually a series of documentary miniatures that are broadcast daily, after the news blocks. There you could see and hear stories about social phenomena, history, culture, ecology and interesting personalities. They are recorded by journalists from newsrooms all over Europe, and this week a documentary series by author Maja Popović called "Tamo gde te čeka neko" was broadcast. In four episodes, she reminded of probably the most humane move of a country during the dark war years. In 1993, the Greek government proposed to the EU countries to join the aid program for remediating the consequences of the wars in the territory of the former Yugoslavia, by accepting and hosting children from the Balkans. No one responded, but the Greeks, primarily the mayor of Athens at the time, did not give up and over the next 19 years, 21.000 children spent several months in more than 200 places throughout Greece. They were ten years old then, and today they are adults who talk about that experience. There are also people from the Red Cross, activists from Greece, journalists and parents. I well remember that time and those people who came to Serbia alone and offered help.

These ten-minute episodes are impossible to watch without tears, because we must never forget that friendship. Greek families from the north remember refugees from Turkey, Greeks in Crete also remember them, so it is touching when they say that it is part of their DNA, and that they have become better people because they helped children. This series is good to see right now, at the beginning of the tourist season, when you think that the only connection between Serbs and Greeks is the price of apartments, sunbeds or gyros. What also resonates in this film is the sentence of the parents who lost everything except their children in the war, and who said that they would give their children only to God and the Greeks. Let's face it, even though this is a move by a government, in essence the stories are about ordinary people, of various faiths and nations, who are able to provide help and comfort to each other. This is the Europe where such solidarity is seen less and less today. If you do not have Euronews Serbia in your offer, you can still watch the episodes on the YouTube channel.

For the end, I left something completely different. It is not the premiere, but actually the announcement of the new season on Pink Television. Despite the huge odium, Željko Mitrović announced the start of the reality show "Zadruga 7", which is entitled "Elita". Apparently, he sees citizen protests, criticism of reality shows and pressure to abolish or limit them as a personal conflict with the cultural elite he despises. He is largely right, it must be said, because in the case of the criticism of Pink and Happy Television, it is a conflict that is ethical, cultural and value-based. These are different pictures of the world rather than politics or ideology. The new season will be special because the prizes will be twice as big, the show crazier and more glamorous, just as the new social elite believes that money can buy status in society. Željko Mitrović knows what he wants to preserve in Serbia and what he wants to promote, I'm just surprised that in the war between two operators and providers, he represents a safe intersection and his channels are broadcast by both providers without reservation. A subset of channels offered by SBB and Telekom are always Happy and Pink, so maybe Željko has a reason to consider himself an unquestionable Elite.