“My wife gave me the idea in bed one night,” explains Hannu Taanila, the show’s producer. “I had been asked to deliver a speech to a wine club and was going to do it in French. But my wife said, ‘Why not Latin?”’ Why not indeed, and in late 1989 Taanila took the dead language live by sneaking a Latin bulletin into his weekly arts-review program. The rest, as they say, historia est. Listeners tuned in for the latest abductio aeria (hijacking) or breach in Murus Ignominiosus (that’s the Berlin wall). John Paul II has become a fan. “The pope was amused,” says Juhani Niinisto, FBC’s head of external broadcasting. “He made very positive noises about it.” So did the Austrians, who just launched their own service-two pages of news in Latin on national TV, updated thrice weekly.
