Director of Unrest

TV-philes spend the summer waiting for September and the new schedules of the national channels, the announcements of new (old) shows and series, and until then, now that most of us have the most time, on holiday - brother, mow through the repeats, and watch what you have already watched. And pay for it.

RTL (+ Voyo) - aggressively advertising and trailing a new crime series, „Specijalisti“, though the young actors somehow do not inspire confidence in me. They are also announcing a travelogue-cum-tourist race called „Asia Express: The Dragon Route“ with Borna Kotromanić and others… hosted by Antonija Blaće. At the moment they are also running the Slovenian „Farma“ - Kmetija, oh boy oh boy… Same goes for Ivan Šarić and company in season 2 of „Direktor svemira“ - Director of the Universe - (shot, then not aired until now) - oh boy, oh boy… oh boy… The best RTL thing for me is still three days of Formula 1, Friday to Sunday (not every week). Repeats of „Married at First Sight“ (RTL 2, Saturday mornings) took me back to the legendary Saša, and it would be brilliant if she signed up for „Love Island Adria“ so we could see her escapades there too, at least for a while, though who knows, maybe she has sorted herself out in the meantime?

Personally, while writing on the computer, tapping away on the phone, skimming through everything - mostly in the mornings lately (or on a repeat, or even rewinding the schedule backwards, on Max TV) - I watch (sometimes with half an eye) HTV 2: travel and cooking shows, and property buying and doing up too - pure zen! And new crime series and episodes on HTV, though often I have no idea which series is in a new season and which one is old.

Nova TV keeps hammering away at Turkish soaps; for the autumn schedule they are announcing a new home-grown series, „Slučajna obitelj“ - Accidental Family - which for sure will again be set in some small town, with a tavern, a priest and similar „godfathers“, oh dear oh dear… oh dear… I watch them least, so…

Sport has taken over the small screens since the football World Cup (mostly on HTV), successes in swimming, water polo, athletics, and a gymnastics medal is still awaited. Our footballers are doing rather well internationally too, the coefficients are climbing, hopefully they will get through another round or two.

Many would say our national television channels are rubbish (they are not), but for days now the news has been dominated by figures about tens, even hundreds of thousands of tonnes of rubbish all over Croatia, most of all in Gospić, and fires in an ultra-dry season (crops are failing, and so are fruit trees, vegetables…). Will we survive, somehow, until autumn? I am hyperventilating, even with the air conditioning on in the room.

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Tjedna vizita - literally „the weekly round“, as in a doctor doing the rounds - is Darko’s television column. It ran in the Zagorski list and its instalments were numbered. Two survive in the archive: number 121 from February 2006, which back then was never published due to a technical error, and number 142. Both are in Croatian.