CARPI
He now willingly tells contrabassoon stories, smiling at himself and at the timeItaly paleo television who became passionate about him thirty-six years ago. If Lando Degoli, first place and poor Leave or double, he chose to commit suicide at the age of 71 by gunshot, it must have been due to a secret suffering so different that it would be unpleasant to investigate; or maybe just because he calmly decided it was time to leave without hesitation.
They found him on Wednesday evening, 3 or 4 days after the shot that no one heard, at his house in Carpi, where he lived after the death of his wife Adriana. Everyone remembers him, the contrabassoon professor. He was the first to scream in disappointment ouch ouch ouch! until the age of twenty-six years Mike Bongiorno; he was the first to stumble, in front of millions of spectators hanging on his lips, when he was about to reach the fairy tale figure of 2 million and 560 thousand lira, but no, wrong answer!That is not fake staff operas in which Verdi uses contrabassoon, but And Carlos, What a shame Mr Degoli, you have lost everything.
“Breath into the trumpet”, “The right answer”: this is how Mike Bongiorno changes language, not just TV language
edited by the Spettacoli editorial team
No one, among the small group of friends and relatives gathered that evening on Via Berengario, was able to shake off the memory of when, gleefully clutching his solid double-breasted jacket, he entered the televisions. Rai-TV is still a child. It was nighttime November 26, 1955, the first episode of quiz quiz, an unrivaled genre archetype. The greatest broadcast ever, Degoli vouched a few days before his death to a reporter from Journal from Karpi. THAT modern quiz, billionaires and imbeciles, he no longer pays attention to them, he hates them: repeated broadcasts, no use. Not that one. Leave it or double it that’s special.
‘Wheel of Fortune’ returns to TV for Mike Bongiorno’s 100th birthday
edited by the Spettacoli editorial team
In its journey, it is a transmission of discovery. In fact, he found aItaly is unthinkable, Italy a thousand Pichi della Mirandola, provincial monomaniac scholar with an extraordinary encyclopedic memory: Marianini Mephistophele, the enormous Garoppo, the Bolognani lioness… Lando Degoli that’s one of them. He was cultured in his own way: two degrees, in physics and mathematics. And his great love for opera and the musical instruments of which it is the subject, a special skill that led him to emerge among 300 thousand candidates.
The bars are amazing to look at, up there television mounted on a perch very tall, big round face in concentration, Emilia’s voice choosing her performers, composers and dates one after another. A television legend: journalists rushed to interview him, invited him to social parties, Gina Lollobrigida gave him a waltz. Then, December 17th. Question about contrabassoon: for the first time Degoli had difficulty, he was sweating in the cabin, at the end of the minute he was whispering fake staff but that’s wrong. Goodbye millions, in the bars you swallow, you must go home with Seicento, consolation prize.
Armando Vertorano, profession “questionnaire”: “I will tell you the secrets of television quizzes”
by Antonio Dipollina
But no, the professor rebelled, he appealed: it was a trap, there are two of Verdi’s works with contrabassoon, there are also those Macbeththe question is poorly worded. Italy split in two, even a parliamentary question arose. And the professor wins, he returns to the show, but only to retire definitively, elegantly, without doubling. The people in the bar, the audience members who didn’t know his name yet, were all with him. Even Pope Pius XII, with the mediation of the weekly newspaper, he welcomed him to a private audience. Perhaps to cheer him up, he lovingly asked him: but is this contrabassoon a modern instrument? Your Majesty, answered the professor, with a loquacious humility, they discovered it at the end of the seventeenth century. He then drowned his sorrows among the ruins of the Roman Forum, as predicted by Nostradamus (he discovered it later, and perhaps he was not surprised): «The great theater will be full of traps, the first competitors will come out taking cover among the collapsed and corroded arches».
But TV has no memory: and the next 36 years of the professor’s life were not the life of a star, but of a serious and obscure professional. high school teacher, dozens of publications, chairman of the mathematics university in Bologna, then in Modena, wise investments that apparently left his heirs with a bank account of two billion. Then retirement, and a new passion for painting. He painted landscapes. But most importantly, he painted contrabassoons, dozens of them, in a variety of colors and moods. “I want to go back to television, it was a great experience”, he tells journalists occasionally, on TV anniversaries or when they make a comeback. Leave it or double it from a drawer, they remembered him and went to look for him in a small house with an unkempt garden, where he told them to enter with a little caution. Then, one day, he decided the broadcast was over.
