In a previous research carried out by Censis on the modalities of television for reporting reality and the different social subjects, in that case focussing on immigrants and ethnic minorities, fiction was seen as a highly developed Italian capacity of being in harmony with the Country, of explaining society and its multiple aspects in an articulated way and from many viewpoints. And in that work how far this was from television as an information service, its difficulty of "keeping up with the times", proposing a partial representation, when not even a distorted view of reality, had already been noticed.

Those results have been confirmed by the annual analysis of Italian fiction, carried out by Milly Buonanno, the director of the Observatory on Italian fiction: "In the course of the years, Italian fiction has illustrated society and social change in various ways; it has dealt a lot with the family and it has recognised the transformation; it has started to bring into the limelight and to recognise the new social and professional roles of women, of certain collective changes in customs and lifestyle, and recently even of the multiethnic society that is developing. Some of these stories have been more effective and portentous, other have sunk into the sea of wishful thinking or of good intentions, and yet others have just floated on the surface of common sense". All of them, however, have been able to record and to portray the tensions and the "hot topics" of Italian society.

From this point of view, in the panorama of home TV viewing, fiction produced by the Rai seems to be particularly dedicated to social themes.

Going into the merits of the contents, it emerges from Milly Buonanno's analysis that fiction prefers to tell stories based on "a safe society, not anxiety ridden, but harmonious and conciliating". In this sense it would seem that fiction moves in the opposite direction from information programmes, which on the contrary, as resulted from the analysis of newscasts and programmes, have the tendency to exasperate tragic situations, especially those involving children. That is certainly indisputable, but it is not all.

It should be added that fiction has shown a certain capacity to explain the complexity that characterises our era, the co-presence of a multiplicity of elements that cannot always be traced back to precise counter posed categories, "good and bad", "fair and unfair", and so on.

This is evident in the delicacy and the attention with which the themes analysed were treated, avoiding extreme positions or falling into model simplifications.

About two hundred Italian fiction films were broadcast during the period in question and, of these, only nine included a painful episode involving one or more children. The fiction films examined were:

1. Dieci storie di bambini, broadcast on Rai 1, with five episodes;
2. L'uomo che piaceva alle donne, a film for TV, broadcast on Rai 2;
3. Cuore, a play broadcast on Rai 1 in four instalments;
4. Io ti salver÷, a Rai 1 series;
5. La casa dell'angelo, a series broadcast on Rai 1;
6. Un posto al sole, the Rai 3 soap opera, with ten instalments;
7. Vento di ponente, a Rai 2 series;
8. Incantesimo, a Rai 2 series;
9. La squadra, a Rai 3 series.

Tables 56 and 57 show the distribution among the three Rai networks of the fiction analysed and between the various kinds: four of the nine fiction productions were broadcast on Rai 1, three on Rai 2 and two on Rai 3; six of them are series, with a total of nine episodes, one is a soap opera with ten instalments broadcast in the period examined, dedicated to the story of a child, and the other two are a TV film with five episodes and a feature film produced for television. Table 58 shows the central role of the episode relative to the fiction production or relative to the single episode itself. It can be supposed that in two cases the episodes constitute one of the "pillars" of the whole fiction, in three cases the focus was a central story of one or more episodes, while in four cases neither the fiction itself nor the single episode focused on a painful event. Except for the TV film on Rai 1, Dieci storie di bambini, explicitly aimed at children and adolescents and transmitted early in the morning at the weekend, all the other fiction productions were addressed to an adult audience, or at least a mixed audience, and were broadcast in the early evening.

A purely qualitative analysis reveals that all the stories introduce reflection on ethics or deal with a social problem, while Dieci storie di bambini has an explicitly educational intention. The themes dealt with were old age, the condemnation of the abandonment of the elderly and the story of the relationship between the generation of grandparents and that of grandchildren, the lack of spaces specially dedicated to children within the city; emigration and the uprooting from one's native land with the consequent difficulty of fitting into the new context; the difficult father / son relationship with the latter suffering because of the incapacity of the former to show care and love and support, the role of illness and its capacity to bring together again people who had grown apart; illegal immigration, dealt with both from the viewpoint of recounting the suffering caused by a similar experience, and introducing the component of social denouncement against those who take advantage of this situation - those who organise the boats without scruples, pursuing only their own interests at the cost of the lives of the passengers transported; the child at the centre of a difficult relationship between parents and the positive role of the school as an important reference point in such a difficult family situation; unemployment, in the face of which the presence of an ill son represents both a burden for the father who feels responsible but who cannot guarantee treatment, and an instrument of blackmail for society, a lever on which to lean in order to obtain a job and in the face of a suicide / homicide threat; lastly, the subject of the confrontation between cultures, springing from the death of a girl following infection caused by being subjected by the African mother, and unbeknownst to the Italian father, to the rite of infibulation, with the explanation that otherwise she would be ostracised by the Muslim community and would never find a husband.

On the whole, the fiction productions analysed all showed great attention in dealing with difficult, and even tragic, questions involving children. One has the impression of a great awareness of how delicate it is to deal with the theme of childhood, and that the subjects were always treated completely and explicitly, with a careful study of the profiles of the characters and the possible implications, always being "politically correct".

Source: Censis survey on data from the R-Telev. Audience Inf. Centre, 2002

Source: Censis survey on data from the R-Telev. Audience Inf. Centre, 2002

Source: Censis survey on data from the R-Telev. Audience Inf. Centre, 2002

Source: Censis survey on data from the R-Telev. Audience Inf. Centre, 2002

Tab. 2 - The subjects dealt with in the fiction productions analysed

The issues

• The elderly
• Emigration
• The lack of spaces for children
• The difficulty of the father / son relationship and the capacity of illness to bring them together
• Illegal immigration
• The school as a reference point for the child facing a difficult relationship between parents
• Unemployment, exacerbated by the presence of an ill son
• The confrontation between different cultural models

Source: Censis survey on data from the R-Telev. Audience Inf. Centre, 2002