Colpo Grosso

Colpo Grosso (Big Shot) was an Italian television program, broadcast for 5 seasons from 1987 to 1992 in late evening on the Italia 7 syndication network.

The main host of the program was Umberto Smaila, replaced in the last edition by Maurizia Paradiso first and then by the couple made up of Massimo Guelfi and Gabriella Lunghi. The direction of the first edition was entrusted to Pino Callà, while the subsequent ones were curated by Celeste Laudisio.

Produced by Fininvest, the manager of Italia 7's programming at the time, the program was set in a casino enriched by the presence of numerous girls who offered strip teases during each episode, as did the contestants themselves. The title deliberately took up the Italian title of a film by Frank Sinatra, set in a casino.[1]

Despite being considered by many critics as a low-profile show of dubious taste, the program achieved enormous public success, also considering the small channel that broadcast it, with share peaks exceeding 2 million viewers.[2] Smaila himself, in an interview during Enzo Biagi's program I dieci commandamenti on Rai 1, declared that the audience could easily be identified as the medium-high range.

The popularity of the programme, considered today a cult of commercial television, remained high even after the closure of the programme, thanks to the continuous re-proposal of repeat episodes on regional broadcasters who still owned the masters and on the Mediaset channels Happy Channel (from 1998 to 2005) and Mediaset Extra (since 2015).

  1. ^ Grosso, David; Boissière, Cédric; Faustini, Marco (21 August 2015). "Thin Film Deposition Techniques". The Sol-Gel Handbook. Wiley-VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA. pp. 277–316. doi:10.1002/9783527670819.ch09. ISBN 978-3-527-33486-5. Retrieved 21 June 2023.
  2. ^ "il video strip è morto di overdose". Archivio Storico Corriere della Sera. 24 December 2014. Archived from the original on 24 December 2014. Retrieved 21 June 2023.