Just like a parent, RAI seemed to be hovering in the background all the time while we were growing up

Italian state TV started off small in the early 1950s, with just one channel.

But from these humble beginnings RAI rose and rose - it currently boasts three terrestrial channels, numerous regional divisions, and a brand new 24-hour news cable channel.

But the last two generations of Italians simply refer to it as mamma RAI.

Just like a parent, RAI seemed to be hovering in the background all the time while we were growing up.

Despite a certain moral prudishness, and a tendency to hector and patronise, it was a fundamentally benign presence.

Even children's bedtime was entrusted to it.

RAI was the arbiter of taste and manners and the custodian of grammar and pronunciation.

Ask any Italian under 30 and they will tell you that they were sent to bed after Carosello, an early evening round-up of adverts.

And how gentle and innocuous they were - middle-aged housewives bantered with the milkman, a retired general sipped a digestif in the middle of a traffic roundabout.

On Saturday nights my sister, my mother and I would be glued to the variety shows: frothy but wholesome pageants of sequinned ballerinas, crooners and comedians.

The audiences were massive and faithful - if not entirely out of choice.

Until the advent of private networks in the 1970s and 1980s, RAI was all there was. It was the arbiter of taste and manners and the custodian of grammar and pronunciation.

Bare legs gave way to bare breasts, polite jokes to scatological smut

When people started to tune into new channels showing shopping, tarot reading and porn, RAI panicked and started chasing the audiences downwards.

Bare legs gave way to bare breasts, polite jokes to scatological smut.

I'd left Italy by then and was oblivious to the sharp decline of RAI. But during a stint in Brussels I acquired cable TV, which gave me access to a variety of international channels, including RAI1 as well as Turkish TV.

The Turkish channel seemed a parody of what RAI might one day become: busty singers with too much make-up, ghastly human interest tear-jerkers and endless game shows.

I would sometime put on Turkish TV with the sound turned off, as its absurd circus-like images would keep me company while I worked.

It took me some months to realise that more often than not I'd been watching RAI1 and never noticed the difference.