It was everyone’s most television pope. And, irony of fate, a large part of the big names of the small screen lost its election because the ceremony of the Television Regia Award was scheduled in Sanremo that March 13, 2013. An appointment that, given the sudden white smoke, was not sent live by Rai 1, but packaged and broadcast on deferred two weeks later.

Jorge Bergoglio made his first TV appearance that evening, at dinner time: “You came to take me almost at the end of the world”. Words that immediately conquered the heart of faithful and not. The very first imitation also arrived, during the course of “The Barbaric Invasions”, which on La7 followed and commented on the event hot. To improvise it, paying the voice on that of Javier Zanetti, was Nicola Savino, teased by Daria Bignardi.

Of parodies, others would soon have arrived, pungent such as that of Maurizio Crozza, who imagined a pontiff left alone in the end of revolutionizing the church, or softer, by Dario Ballantini and Massimo Lopez. Until Andro Merkù, who on behalf of “La Zanzara” made a Francesco more likely to be so perfect that even the cloistered nuns of San Benedetto del Tronto in a manual joke.

All the guests

Pope Francis has in fact watered down the concept of television event appearing on television so much, indeed a lot. If in the case of Karol Wojtyla the 1998 phone call live to Bruno Vespa represented the exception, with Bergoglio the media foray has become the rule. From the call to “Uno Mattina” to celebrate the thirty years of the broadcast with Franco Di Mare and Francesca Fiandini, to the one made to Lorena Bianchetti, who will subsequently interview him for “in his image” and who will receive the favor on May 27, 2023, the day in which for the first (and unique) a pontiff once wore the threshold of the Rai production studies of Saxa Rubra.

In Mediaset, on the other hand, both at Tg5, in 2021 and 2022, colliding under the Christmas period with the Vaticanist Fabio Marchese Ragona, while he is with Fabio Fazio who, probably built the best agreement, appearing three times at “Che tempo che fa” (one in Rai and two on the nine), with even the promotion to the program that took place in the full Sunday to report in the middle of the program. by Edith Bruck, Hungarian poet witness of the Shoah.

The first time of a Pope in Sanremo

His also the very first time at the Sanremo Festival, albeit with a recorded video message (dated February 1st according to Carlo Conti) launched on the inaugural evening of this year. It was an appeal against the wars and defense of the children, who preceded the performance of the Israeli Noa and Palestinian Mira Awad. “We never forget that war is always a defeat – he said – this is the one I want most, to see who has hated to tighten the hand, embrace and say with life, music and singing: peace is possible”.

His last months have in a certain sense recalled the final phase of John Paul II. Like him forced to a long hospitalization, like him unable to speak and suffering in the eyes of the world, like him ready to expose himself physically with that last exit from his shoulders similar to the Via Crucis of 2005, followed on a monitor by a Wojtyla framed by Nuca.

The exit of the scene

Francesco’s farewell, however, was more similar to that of Benedict XVI, who disappeared in 2022 in San Silvestro. A date ‘dull’ on the television front, exactly as Easter Monday is generally. In that case, however, we were faced with an emeritus Pope, halved ten years earlier. Detail that contributed to making the event less bombastic. This time not, Bergoglio’s leave turns on the headlights of the world on Rome, in the year of the Jubilee.

“I have not been watching TV since July 15, 1990, for a promise made to the Virgin of Carmel,” revealed some time ago. Television he did not see, but to whom he squeezed his eye like no one else had done before him.