Remembering socialist entertainment: Romanian television, gestures and intimacy

Abstract

This essay tackles the question of why people enjoy the re-broadcasting of state socialist programmes, asking whether their desires are driven by nostalgia, manipulated by neocapitalist schemes that commodify the past as an audience-raising strategy or simply linked to a compulsive desire to revisit a ‘traumatic’ past. To do so, I first draw on existing literature on mediated nostalgia to examine some of the possible explanations for the continued popularity of socialist-era television in post-socialist Eastern Europe. Focusing on the Romanian context, I discuss audience memories of socialist TV and then zoom in on some of the most prevalent memories of socialist entertainment in this country: the New Year’s Eve comedy sketches and Pistruiatul, one of very few television series made in Romania during socialism. I argue that in order to understand the popularity of socialist-era reruns, we need to look both into how audiences remember these programmes and into how these programmes construct long-term affinities with the audience. To do so, I discuss two kinds of pleasures: first, the pleasure of recalling one’s ability to resist ideological messages and, second, the pleasure of re-watching familiar content and, through that, reliving the sense of intimate connection with television characters.