Tani the Great, Topi the Great

At Top Channel, by the standards of the time, I was an almost museum-like species.

In a television founded on the energy of young men, the talent of young women and the idea that the screen should have a new face, I was the one raising the institution’s average age.

And he didn’t ask me how old I was. He appointed me chief editor of a newly created show called Fiks Fare.

At first, Tani imagined Fiks as a program with humor, jokes, punchlines.

But we soon realized Fiks could not be just a program that made people laugh. It had to be a program that confronted people with reality.

When Albanian reality is what it is, the satirist only needs to open the microphone.

And so Tani thought of another program for humor. Portokallia.

That’s how Top Channel began building not just programs, but a television school.

Tani had a big weakness.

And he didn’t have it merely as a taste. He had it as a television principle. He was also extraordinarily detail-oriented.

One day, for the first time, he called me to talk about a studio robot that wasn’t working.

I was a bit surprised. Not that the robot wasn’t working. But that it had caught no one’s eye but his.

We dealt with news, shows, scripts, cameras, people, problems, Albania…

And that was Tani: he saw even what we didn’t see.

Once I fired an employee.

She was beautiful. Indeed, according to Tani’s philosophy, she was exactly the kind of person who shouldn’t be lost to television. She walked out of my office crying. She passed the entrance of the Pyramid, where the café was. Tani was sitting there.

A few minutes later I got a message:

I told him: “I fired her.”

The reply came immediately: “Bring her back. The screen needs beautiful people.”

“Why, will I see your face and Denisa’s there?”

I don’t know if Tani laughed. But the employee returned.

This is one of Albanian television’s stories in a single sentence: the chief editor fires for one reason or another; the founder brings beauty back to the screen. And indeed that girl became known later.

Then Top Channel began to grow. And it grew with young men and women. With people nobody knew and whom all of Albania would later know.

That was one of Topi’s magics.

He didn’t only seek famous people. He sought people who could become famous. And that’s a big difference.

After a while, when he saw that Fiks wasn’t proper humor, Tani asked me to call Agron Llakaj, who was a friend of mine, to build another comedy show, Portokallia.

I called him. But Tani had a condition: 70–80 percent of the actors had to be young and unknown.

So even humor needed an incubator.

Agron brought experience. The young brought energy. Top Channel gave them the screen. And the screen did the rest.

Many of them became names. Because Topi didn’t always wait for talent to arrive famous. He often took the unknown and made them known.

That was Tani’s philosophy. And, in a way, it was also his philosophy for Albania.

Because Tani didn’t build Top Channel just to make money.

Naturally, a television must also live economically.

But he had another idea: television should educate, cultivate and raise the level of Albanians, wherever they were.

He was an idealist. And idealism, in television, is a disease that can cost dearly.

We told him: “The topic is very good, but it doesn’t work.” And sometimes the banal topic worked very well.

Tani’s answer was simple: “Let us not stoop to the people’s level. Let us try to raise them. That is Topi’s duty and aim.”

This sentence, for me, is a kind of editorial testament.

Because it is much easier to come down to the audience than to raise the audience toward you.

It is much easier to say: “That’s what the audience wants.”

Than to ask: “What can we give the audience that it doesn’t yet know it wants?”

And Top Channel became Top Channel.

I, too, in those years, published a book. I gave a copy to Tani. Tani took it. He leafed through it. Then he left it at the café.

I wasn’t upset. Because I knew Tani had a much more serious problem than my literature: he read technology and car magazines.

So, I had written a book. Tani was trying to figure out what cars would do ten years later.

In the end, he turned out more prophetic than me. And my book stayed at the café.

But, strangely, even this seems to me today part of Tani.

He looked ahead. Always a little further than others.

Maybe that’s why Top Channel didn’t remain just a television. It became an institution.

Today, 25 years later, Top Channel is a much bigger creature than it was at the start.

It has passed from the founder’s hands to his family. And that is another kind of responsibility.

Because you don’t inherit just a company. You inherit an idea. You inherit a name. You inherit a way of seeing television.

And it seems Lori has inherited from her father precisely that trait: to see a little further than others.

And, above all, she has inherited the motivation to keep Topi…

Because Top Channel is not just a logo. It is the story of hundreds of people who entered unknown and left known.

It is the story of those who learned television by making television.

It is the story of people who gave something and received something from the screen.

It is Fiks. It is Portokallia. It is the news. It is the studio. It is dozens of shows and the cherry on top, Big Brother.

It is the robot that didn’t work and that only Tani had noticed.

It is also that girl who walked out of my office crying and came back, because Tani decided the screen needed her.

And it is, above all, the idea of a man who believed television should not only give the audience what it asked for.

It should also give it what it didn’t yet know it needed.

That is Tani’s greatest legacy.

Not just the Top Channel he built.

But the people he built together with it.

So, after 25 years, it can be said that Tani the Great didn’t just build a television.

He built a generation of television. And we, who were there at those beginnings, have a small privilege: to say we saw it up close.

Even when we didn’t always understand what he was doing. Because, as happens with people who see further than others, you often understand their vision only after you’ve arrived where they told you to go.

Happy 25th anniversary, Top Channel!

And, Tani… the studio robot works now.

But I don’t know if you would have let it go unnoticed.