Silvio Berlusconi was accused of turning Italian television into a laughing stock Thursday as a searing documentary about the impact of the prime minister's media empire premiered in Venice. 'Television has invaded the collective imagination of the country,' Erik Gandini, director of 'Videocracy', told a press conference at the Venice Film Festival. 'Outsiders laugh at our television, and at Berlusconi ... but it has had a very notable impact on our country.' The documentary by Gandini, who lives in Sweden but was born and brought up in Italy, takes an eye-opening look at both the output on the Italian prime minister's three channels and how it has shaped the country's psyche. Game shows and variety shows featuring scantily clad women, as well as soap operas, now seen by many as a ticket to wealth, fame or power, dominate the channels operated by the Berlusconi family's Mediaset group. Gandini, who lives in Sweden but was born and brought up in Italy, said that there was an unususlly strong link between television and those who exercise power in his native land. 'In Italy, television and power are really connected in a way that's very unusual,' he told selfnews. 'Banality is presented as innocuous... but in Italy it has become a political tool,' he added. 'You can have a career without knowing how to do anything,' he said, pointing to the most prominent example of the Minister for Equal Opportunities, Mara Carfagna, a former showgirl from one of Berlusconi's TV networks. The world of Italian television has become a 'monster' that 'has really used women as objects,' he said. In the film, a young man hoping to make the big time complains that he is outnumbered by woman wanabees: 'So many girls are willing to do anything to get on the fast track to stardom,' he sighs. 'Eighty percent dream of it, of marrying a billionaire footballer.' Berlusconi, in his third stint as prime minister since 1994, has also developed a strong influence over Italy's Rai public television network, which last week refused to air a trailer for 'Videocracy.' 'When I saw the letter from Rai, I thought of George Orwell,' Gandini said. 'The more I read it the more I thought I had been too soft in my film. Now I think a war is under way on freedom of expression, freedom of speech.' While Rai's three stations are public, its president must be approved by the government in power. Traditionally, the first two channels support the ruling majority while the third is close to the centre-left opposition. 