Another television, another country

Upon arriving at the headquarters of Radiotelevisión Española, on the confusing outskirts of Madrid, you always hear the loud chattering of the parrots that nest and stir innumerably in the tops of the pine trees. This invading noise contrasts with the stillness that one finds when entering the labyrinth of corridors that lead to the studios and newsrooms of the radio building, and to the most extensive and solitary spaces occupied by television. The dominant impression is of a bombastic but very worn-out modern architecture, a monumentalism of smooth surfaces, windows and angles that makes me think of official installations of the GDR. It is that modernity in construction that reigned in the sixties and seventies, when a kind of futuristic optimism used to be combined with the neglect and cheapening of materials, so that its promises became as quickly obsolete as its roofs or its electrical installations. or adjusting your windows.

Once the scandal of the parrots is over, the person who has come to pick you up guides you up fake marble stairs, through very large elevators that always seem to be in danger of breaking down, through corridors in which the deserted space makes them resonate more loudly. clarity the steps. In the radio building the routes are shorter and more intelligible, and end in some Newsroom where there are encouraging signs of human presence and activity, and in very well-equipped studios; In the one on television, the corridors, the hangars, the tunnels, the stairs, proliferate as one advances through them, trusting in his guidance so as not to get lost.

Since the guide is usually a young person, one cannot resist showing one's surprise at so much loneliness, at so many empty expanses, and telling him, to avoid silence, what those same places were like 20 or 30 years ago: the permanent animation, the clamor of voices and footsteps, the urgent rhythm of the carpentry work, the workers with their overalls and their tools, the studios so busy with recordings and filming that sometimes those prefabricated warehouses that you see in the works. The younger ones nod with the disbelief of someone who hears improbable things told. The veterans, those who still remain, remember well, and if they have a little confidence they speak with sadness of the long consented abandonment, the drift, the methodical dismantling of what became a great public institution. A proof of everything that was ruined and lost, and of what could have been achieved, is the persistence of a part of the best that came to exist, despite all the sorrows, those of before and those of now, of adversity. permanent one that faces any effort of excellence in our country. As soon as you sit in a National Radio studio, or on a television set, you notice the solvency with which editors, announcers and technicians carry out their tasks, without the daze that one often notices on private networks, with that solidity that It is a necessary feature of public service, and therefore it is touched with melancholy, and even fatalism. It is about doing as best as possible what you know and have to do; and to do so with the full awareness that the results will rarely receive appreciation, and that leaders, political commissars and parliamentary officials care nothing about the quality of public broadcasting. What matters to them, crudely, is the possibility of manipulating and using their hands, the accounting of the minutes and seconds that are dedicated to each match in the news, the list of the favorable or opposing commentators, without the slightest respect for the independence and integrity of a medium in which they only see opportunities for partisan propaganda and for the most prosperous form of business in Spanish-style capitalism: converting what is everyone's heritage into privatization loot; take advantage of power and political contacts to benefit friends and hangers-on.

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In the hallways and in the warehouses and large studios like Spanish Television hangars there is hardly anyone because most of the programs are now made by private producers, according to the same logic that derives public health services from companies that exploit it for profit. own. Massive early retirements eliminated the arsenal of experience and talent of professionals who were at their peak. Being apparently so hostile and so incompatible with each other, the two major parties of the right and the left have behaved with the same mixture of dirigisme and negligence towards public radio and television, creating clouds of favored and unemployed with each change of Government. There was even a socialist government that left television without advertising revenue so that it could be better distributed to private channels, and without ensuring alternative financing. Nor would anyone say now, watching TVE, that there has been a progressive Government in Spain for more than five years. To offer the same contests and the same gossip programs and fake celebrities as any network focused on quick profit and promoting vulgarity, it is not known what public television is needed.

There are those who resist. As in other fundamental Spanish institutions, the only antidote to partisan interference, incompetence and political irresponsibility and privatization pressure is the seriousness of those who continue to do their work with a professional ethic that borders on heroism. I now have fewer opportunities to meet them: many I met were forcibly retired, and those who remain have few opportunities to make programs in which a writer can participate. And yet, when they can, they do it, and they manage to talk about literature and cinema, or they send exemplary chronicles as correspondents in war zones, or they record informative reports that fulfill, against all odds, the crucial task of a public radio and television station: to give an rigorous and balanced vision of reality, so that it serves as a tool of knowledge for citizens, and of entertainment without vulgarity, and why not, also of education and enjoyment of the arts.

Anyone who has worked at the Cervantes Institute learns to look with envy and dismay at the great European institutions that inspired its foundation, the Alliance Française, the British Institute, the Goethe Institute: equipped with sufficient resources, long-term programs and guidelines. , of an autonomy subject of course to the democratic mandate and legality, but not to the vagaries or direct political interference. Whoever listens to or watches the varied channels of the BBC, or French radio and television, understands with resignation, as I understood when seeing the headquarters of the French Alliance on Fifth Avenue in New York, that we are a poorer country, and that There is little remedy for this, no matter how much one sometimes wants to compensate for it with statistical triumphalism about the number of Spanish speakers in the world, as is customary in official ceremonies. But our worst obstacle is not our poverty, but the bitterness that we put into destroying what despite it we have sometimes been able to build, with the same fury with which we feed the chatter of political discord, without the slightest hope of regeneration, yoked to the wheel of a permanent electoral campaign, as if that were the inevitable destiny that has befallen us.

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