Paolo Bonolis 60 years old, from ‘Bim Bum Bam’ to its economic ‘boom’ between parcels and Darwin

In the beginning it was the stutter … then came the record of words spoken in a minute which entered the Guinness World Record. ‘Primates’ often present in his career, even in the Darwinian sense of the term. Paolo Bonolis, who can be very narrowly understood in the professional category of presenters and conductors, turns 60 having been born on June 14, 1961 in Rome. But no Trasteverini of seven generations in the family: the paternal surname, which originally was Bonoli, refers if anything to the Romania of his ancestors, while the final ‘s’ was added much later with the transfer of the family of origin to Sardinia. A question of consonants and vowels also in his rich television career, given that he moved from children’s TV with ‘Bim Bum Bam’ to manage an authentic professional and therefore also economic ‘boom’, achieved above all with the numerous contracts signed for Mediaset, interspersed with ‘returns’ to Rai, the Sanremo Festival and Miss Italy including: attendances almost always rewarded by high ratings and the overwhelming competition with audience shots Sanremo and Miss Italia, ‘Cervelloni’, ‘Bulli & Pupe’ and ‘Sense of life’ The oddities, the bizarre, the exceptions more than the rules, have often filled his programs, from ‘You are a phenomenon’ to ‘Ciao Darwin’, constantly ‘backed up’ by Luca Laurenti, passing through ‘Cervelloni’ and ‘Bulli & Pupe’ and the competitors of ‘Affari tua’ grappling with what for all Italians on the small screen was simply ‘the parcel game’. But also arriving at the format of great human and social sensitivity represented by the ‘Sense of Life’. Even when it presents a program, its conduction gives more the air of a ‘subject play’, thanks to a remarkable capacity for improvisation and wise ‘off the rails’ and an unsuspected storytelling as a child, given that the acting – among other things he was a leading actor in the film ‘Comediasexy’ – was also a sort of ‘cure’ for his stuttering, which as a final result it even led to the Guinness World Record for the number of words he could pronounce in a single minute. To those who claim ‘facts and not words’ we can answer that often we eat even with words, sometimes even well! (By Enzo Bonaiuto)