>>And mind you, that was in the first year here, when everything was still interesting ;).
>
>So you didn't like the Sopranos but are nostalgic about the Wild and Crazy Guy who spontaneously broke a glass on Serbian television? Hmmmm....
>( or was this like Fear Factor and the audience tingled at the terrifying prospect that this guy was going to have to get on a list or standing in line for six hours to get a new glass? <bg> )

The guy was actually a Croatian, but this was on Belgrade TV, and he was invited as a known and controversial TV critic and intellectual par excellence. The source of controversy was his "PITch affair" - where PITch are actually Chaikovsky's initials, but there's only one word in Serbo-Croatian that begins with "pič*" and that's "cun*". Which he used to stir more controversy over his initial thesis that Pyotr Ilyich was the most commercial hit maker of pop-music in his time, and so were the Strausses and the Bach family. We're praising it as classic now just because it's old enough. And so will today's pop music be praised in a century - Beatles will be classics.

So they get this guy with a couple of others, in a "TV mail" show which was usually just a filler - basically a TV version of letters to editor column - and they get about twenty minutes to discuss. Don't remember what exactly, but it came to the bad sides of live transfers ("prenos" - "carry over" - see, they even had a better expression than "live feed", when you say "prenos fudbalske utakmice" it unambiguously means "live transmission of a football match"), and this Igor Mandić guy starts arguing that live show is the soul of TV, it's something that no other medium can't do, show you stuff as it happens, with the full knowledge that noone on Earth knows exactly what happens next. And then he picked the glass from the table (imagine Charlie Rose setting, but with a somewhat lower table and too much empty space around, all lit, no shadow) and just smashed it on the table. "See - this is TV." I remember the closing credits scrolling over the broken glass.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Igor_Mandi%C4%87 but article is almost empty.