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180 Annemarie Sorescu-Marinkovié becomes the ideal means of enforcing the communist ideology and ethics. Dana Mustatá, in an essay on the secret watching of foreign TV in communist Romania, notices that "the media played the key role in the turning of Ceausescu into an idol to be obeyed" (2013: 155). His age was the age of television, where the shooting camera was ubiguitous: smile and enthusiasm were the compulsory features of the coverage and reports meant to depict the “new life”; the Party and its beloved leader were the shining faces which the TV screen would introduce into each and every household (Cernat et al. 2008: 261). After the fall of the totalitarian regime in December 1989, numerous memoirs of everyday life under communism were published in Romania. Many discuss the scarcity of TV broadcast in the late 1980s. Paul Cernat, for example, remembers: “I was watching the entire TV program, even the most boring agricultural shows, everything was of interest to me. In Ploiesti, in my grandparents’ house, I was watching with them, in an old fashioned manner, the entire broadcast” (Cernat et al. 2004: 24). Cernat describes the “satisfaction full of interest with which I would watch the funerals of important communist leaders” (Ibid.: 25), when TVR did not broadcast anything else. Watching Foreign TV in Socialist Europe As a legitimate reaction to the reduction of TV broadcast time and the ubiquitous and subversive communist propaganda, Romanians started to look for alternatives that would satisfy their need for information and entertainment. As the televisions of the neighbouring states had a rather strong signal in the border zones, watching Bulgarian, Hungarian, or Yugoslav televisions became a way of reversing the isolation and the self-sufficiency ideal imposed by Ceausescu’s regime. Furthermore, it became a way of parting the imaginary iron curtain separating communist Romania from the West and even from the communist, but far more liberal, countries of the region. Alexandru Matei, writing the history of Romanian television in its glorious years (1965-1983), notices that, in the 1980s, TVR relinquishes all roles, except for the propagandistic one. Instead, its place is taken by the para-television network: The object of media studies in the monotonous 1980s in Romania should be the para-television network in the country: the practice of watching foreign movies on videotapes, the satellite dishes whose installation was, paradoxically, permitted (at least in Transylvania, where no channel of national television was in range), as well as massive watching, in the vicinity of the borders, of neighbouring televisions (the best known is the case of Bulgarian TV, everyday guest of Bucharesters) (Matei 2013: 58). Watching the “bourgeois” televisions of neighbouring states was common practice in the border zones of the Eastern Bloc. The programs of Western televisions (mainly those of Italy and West Germany) allowed people from eastern Europe to
