During one of the workshops run at this year's Prix Italia, the BBC producer Adam MacDonald, describing his Walking With Dinosaurs series (currently being screened) and speaking about the future of television, concluded by stating that "We want to walk with the dinosaurs, we don't want to die like the dinosaurs." Carlo Sartori, secretary general of the Prix Italia, in a thoughtful report on what exactly the word "quality" has come to mean in broadcasting these days, warned that quality (and the Prix itself) could equally well go the way of the dinosaurs if the relationship between broadcasting quality and the marketplace was not better understood.
And he was pulling no punches when he said that too many times, quality has been forgotten in the everyday routine of the productive and programming processes: "Quality, as it is conceived and appreciated here at the Prix Italia, has been overlooked by our broadcasters and seen as a synonym of elitism, if not of boredom and lack of consideration for the needs of the public in general."
Some 300 delegates from 36 countries attended this 51st Prix Italia, held principally in Florence, with side-tracks to nearby Siena. The itinerant festival has had its share of problems over the years, but the Florence show was generally held to be a largely successful event. Some delegates were unhappy, however, at the lack of the usual viewing rooms, though selecting and watching TV entries on the innovative encrypted satellite channel, TV Files Carousel, was an impressive alternative system: but some people just happen to regard television-viewing as a shared social event.
An allied criticism - one that has come up regularly in recent years of the Prix - was the lack of any focal point in Florence for social or business interaction or merely the exchange of ideas. The main Prix venue did not even offer coffee facilities. There was talk of the glory days of smaller and more compact venues like Capri, when you could not fail to meet delegates - or a jury member to quiz why your programmes hadn't made the short list - in the central square at almost any time of the day or night.
As to the programme entries themselves, it would be a cliche to say the quality was mixed - but at least the quality of the jury reports was noticeably better than in some previous years, when some jurors never turned up at all, or (in certain well-known cases) spent their time sightseeing, while others made minimal contributions. Indeed, if programme makers were sincerely interested in improving their work (and their chances of winning) they would do well to read the appropriate jury reports.
The TV fiction jury, for example, was struck by the fact that so many entries looked back at the past, and how a substantial number of them were based on literary classics of their respective countries of origin: "Whether this is a result of millennial anxieties or because the producers were working on the rather dubious assumption that the adaptation of literary works guarantees quality television, was impossible to determine."
Before producing its shortlist, the jury asked three questions. Is the programme innovative, does it have something to say, and does it provoke an emotional response? The winner of the single play award was a Finnish play, White Marble by Matt Ijas, a tragicomic tale of a stubborn old married man who deserts his own 75th birthday party. Two British entries were shortlisted in serials - Channel Four's Queer as Folk, the controversial soap-opera style saga of gay sex in Manchester, and the eventual winner, the BBC's Shooting the Past, the peculiar but highly enjoyable tale of oddball archivists rallying round to save a photographic archive.
The radio fiction jury, which considered 32 entries from 22 countries, also found to its clear disappointment that many productions either relied heavily on the past, on historical events, or were adapted from literary sources. RTE's entry, Minuet by Harriet O'Carroll, a radio costume drama which tells the tale of Jane Austen's youthful romance with an Irishman, probably fell at this hurdle, as it did not reach the short list. The jury noted that the current issues of the end of this century, such as mass migration and environmental concerns, were hardly touched on. Too many entries were conservative in their approach to the use of the radio medium, and "so few productions were brave enough to take chances with both style and content". On the whole the productions were very "safe". The winner was Italian radio's Unscheduled Show Number Seven, a witty tongue-in-cheek parody on the making of radio plays, taken from the scripts that the young Federico Fellini wrote during the war, before he went on to fame as a movie director.
The TV documentary jury also complained of a lack of innovation and originality among the submitted entries, and felt that the distinction between the two categories - cultural and factual - was both arbitrary and artificial. On a practical note it made the very sensible recommendation that jury reports be sent to all members (it didn't actually say that those people who submit programmes should first be forced to read the jury reports, but that was the implication). In the end the cultural award went to The Hunt, a thoughtful Dutch documentary on the world of English fox-hunting, and the factual/current affairs prize was picked up by Channel Four's True Stories - The Valley, a study of the Kosovo war which focused on the inhabitants of the Drenica Valley villages trapped by Serbs.
In TV Performing Arts, however, the Channel Four programme Vile Bodies - Naked (part of a series about how well- known photographers are challenging taboos about the naked body - or just being disgusting, as some viewers felt) was snubbed by the jury and eliminated "as the subject matter was entirely about the visual arts". Sweden won the category with a beautiful and comical reworking of Sleeping Beauty, which won praise for its outstanding choreography.
In factual radio documentaries the clear and popular winner was the American entry The Sunshine Hotel, an audio portrait of life in a Bowery flophouse.
RTE entered two television programmes and two radio programmes to this year's competition but none of them made it to a shortlist. While the Prix Italia standards can be very high, and the prizes, worth about £6,500 each, are naturally much sought after, it may be that the RTE authorities need to think harder before selecting particular programme entries - and re-read a number of jury reports, particularly those referring to originality and innovation.