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Taking dandruff off Eurovision

2022-05-16T22:20:37.103Z


The stars aligned and RTVE managed to avoid a new embarrassment Impossible to forget it. When you entered Spanish Television, the first thing that struck you was the lack of glamour. I'm talking about the second half of the 1970s: at the payment window you queued up with illustrious actresses charging allowances and characters clinging to mysterious documents. You were in the corridors with the supposed head of the censors, a bald little man who claimed to hav


Impossible to forget it.

When you entered Spanish Television, the first thing that struck you was the lack of glamour.

I'm talking about the second half of the 1970s: at the payment window you queued up with illustrious actresses charging allowances and characters clinging to mysterious documents.

You were in the corridors with the supposed head of the censors, a bald little man who claimed to have a gun "for when the reds show up."

It wasn't scary.

Surprises abounded.

I found out that my top theorist, the director of music programs, was a sports broadcaster.

And not just any filmmaker: Ramón Díez was a legend on the soccer fields.

He was a cordial man, to whom one day I dared to ask what a man like you does in a position like this.

"It's just that here there have been a lot of scoundrels in cahoots with the record companies."

oh

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Aware of his musical shortcomings, Díez consulted you when faced with some tricky matter.

In 1978, German television had recorded the overwhelming

show

of the Nigerian Fela Kuti in Berlin.

As part of the UER (European Broadcasting Union), TVE could broadcast the concert.

Díez had carnal doubts: “It's that they come out black.

Naked blacks!

We can drop a fat one ".

I tried to argue that these formidable dancers were the singer's wives, married in a Yoruba ceremony.

He didn't hang.

Díez breathed a sigh of relief when he returned to sports, in charge of coordinating the television broadcast of the 1982 World Cup. His successors had fewer problems: the big-budget programs (the most coveted) went to the Primera, while the specialized ones ( noticeably shorter lifespans) went to the Second Chain.

If a conflict arose, the solution was blunt: if a space on the Second got, let's say, an appetizing clip, it was forced to dismantle the program and cede the exclusive to the powerful program.

True.

The House had dark areas in the Eurovision section.

The system of "internal election" suggested strange cabals and, many times, resounding blunders.

You heard echoes of embarrassing situations involving participants who didn't really know where they were and, for example, stole some competing Ray-Bans at a public event.

In general, the biggest disasters reflected the abilities of record companies to cajole RTVE directors with minimal knowledge of pop music and nebulous ideas of what could be a festival song with a chance of success.

Attention!

Ignorance could be rewarded in Prado del Rey: if the selection method multiplied the number of programs dedicated to Eurovision, manna fell in the form of bonuses on the theoretically responsible person.

I got to see an internal statement that revealed what was charged in a year by the head of Espacios Musicales y de Variedades.

To get an idea: the amount tripled the official salary of José María Aznar as President of the Government in that same year.

Eurovision was dying, due to the clumsiness of its Spanish leaders and the ups and downs of internal mechanisms.

He was saved by the emergence of social networks, which allow each viewer to play his favorite fantasy: acting as national coach.

In recent years, RTVE has jumped on the bandwagon of guilty pleasures and has imitated the latest success formulas, disguised as a

hipster

.

And he has been right with Chanel, an industrial product that was fortunate not to face the usual pachangas.

His Caribbean energy made us forget that most of the competitors had superior creative dignity.

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Source: elparis

All news articles on 2022-05-16

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