Jordi LP at the Barcelona Golf Club on July 7. Albert Garcia
Jordi LP is not dead.
He affirms it himself, with these words, in the videos that he posts on social networks to promote one of his shows.
Jordi López Peña (Esplugues de Llobregat, 1962), better known as Jordi LP, is the comedian who made “the worst television in Spain”.
This is also emphasized by him during the interview with EL PAÍS, sitting in front of a café in one of his favorite places, the Barcelona Golf Club restaurant, in Sant Esteve de Sesrovires.
He lives next to the golf course, a sport that is his second great passion;
the first is to entertain the public from him.
Jordi LP admits that in the nineties he was part of what is known as trash TV, but he adds that he always did it to entertain and without ever falling into foul language.
The humor that made his generation famous, him, Mr. Barragán or Marianico el Corto, would end up in court today, he says, but stresses that he did not use swear words, unlike what contemporary young humorists use, according to his experience .
Jordi LP was signed personally in 1991 by Valerio Lazarov, the great boss of Telecinco, when the private channels were starting up.
Between 1991 and 1993 he appeared on TV3 and Telecinco.
He presented programs with Bertín Osborne [
The Battle of the Stars
] and was part of the legendary
Tutti frutti
, where the Mamachicho danced.
The fall was as fast as the ascent.
Ten years later, Jordi LP disappeared from the screens: “One day they stop calling you, and that's it.
And if you don't appear on television, it seems that you are dead.
Jordi LP in an image from last July and in one from 1993 from the program 'The Battle of the Stars'.
albert garcia
The comedian who made the worst television in Spain is currently "hyperspecialized" in company events and solidarity acts.
He stars in three to six bowling monthly on average.
His milestones are several: a Nestlé congress in Las Vegas, in which he acted before 450 commercials of the food multinational;
another congress of the Condis supermarket chain at the Waldorf Astoria or the cruise ship chartered by Porcelanosa in 2007, which crossed the Atlantic Ocean on the
Queen Mary 2.
There are few public videos of these shows because they are private performances in which intimacies of the company or the group of friends who hire him are shared.
Case in point: in July he performed for a client's 50th anniversary, and the client provided him with information on 26 of the guests to play some pranks on them.
Celebrities, he explains, also raffle it off.
This year Jordi LP celebrates four decades in
show business
.
His fame began in 1988, with the character
Bocagrossa in the
Tres pics i
repicado contest
.
LP was discovered by the program's team when he was performing at the Don Chufo club, but by then he had already been in the military for years performing in discos and clubs.
Bocagrossa
was a ghost with gold bracelets, a character he never did again.
From
Tres pics i repicado
he jumped to the TVE program
But what is this
and in the Catalan regional one he continued in another contest,
El joc del segle
, coinciding with his most active years at Telecinco.
When he ended the contract with the Mediaset network, in 1994, his figure gradually faded until, with the first years of the new millennium, Jordi LP was already a television animal from the past.
Jordi LP says that if he had presented himself with the second surnames of his parents, Barceló and Berenguer, he would now be a lawyer or would be on TV3.
He does not want to know anything about Catalan public television, due to old clashes and because he is convinced that if they wanted to hire him, they would have already called him.
But what he does want is to return to television.
He hasn't left her either, he collaborates on
Benvingust
, a gastronomy program on the Esplugues municipal television.
But his eyes light up when he asks what a
late show
of his would be like on a platform or on a large network, a talk show and in which he would have three old men commenting on current affairs.
Getting out of the limelight is hard if the glory goes to your head.
Jordi LP remembers that in an hour he earned the same as his father's monthly salary, a boilermaker in Esplugues.
One of the most emotional moments of his career was a gala in which he performed alongside Miguel Gila and Tip y Coll.
“Gila told me that humor was like the Guadiana, that you are, you are not and you are again.
And he added that I was very good and that I would always be there.”
In WhatsApp profiles we write phrases to introduce ourselves.
Jordi LP only has one word to define himself: “Reinventing himself”.
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