Nostalgia is no longer what it used to be, says the clever title of Simone Signoret’s memoirs. That sentence was the first thing that came to my mind when I was asked, along with other colleagues, to participate in this series of articles on television memories. We were told that we should not fall into nostalgia when looking back, but, what the hell, I thought we had come to play.
The fact is that when I started to choose a topic, I came up against my reality. I don’t feel too nostalgic about the huge amount of TV I’ve seen since I can remember, mainly for a reason implicit in the previous sentence: I remember it. It doesn’t mean that I didn’t enjoy it then or that I despise it now; it’s just that the mechanism by which one idealizes what one experienced in childhood and youth because deep down what one misses is one’s childhood and youth doesn’t work with me when it comes to TV. The TV that raised me, in the nineties, was the one of the beginning and explosion of private channels, one with no limits and lots of money, the one of the culture of the big hit, the one of the big media groups, the war for audiences, the morbidity and the Mama Chicho, the rise of Globomedia. Will I remember all my life how I looked at the phone hoping it would ring while I was watching TV? Hello Raffaella! At the same time I was afraid that no one in my house would say the magic words when I picked up the phone? Of course they would. Will the image of Monica Naranjo, with her two-tone hair and a dress somewhere between lilac and sky blue, descending from the same phone, pass before my eyes before I die? Surprise, surprise? Surely. Will I forever hear the voice of Matías Prats exclaiming: “Holy God!” when the second plane crashed into the Twin Towers on my mother’s 54th birthday? Of course.
But the television I really miss is the television I didn’t see. As a viewer, I miss the television we had – because it was provided by the State – from 1976 to 1990, the year Telecinco and Antena 3 began broadcasting. Also, as a professional in the media, I am so often forced to resort to it that I have internalized it as much as the one I saw live. Of course, it wasn’t perfect, it suffered political pressures and interference, it was in the technological prehistory and it was the fruit of a society yet to be made in many aspects. But at the same time it was adult, modern even seen from today and it demanded more from its viewer. It took them for clever, something that cannot be attributed to much television today.
When RTVE was the only player on the Spanish screen, when La 2 was still called UHF, an enviable television was made in our country. Only in the eighties, in fiction, were there Fortunata and Jacinta, Blue summer, The joys and the shadows, Ramón y Cajal, Gold Rings, The Trial of Mariana Pineda, Teresa de Jesús, The Trace of Crime, The Pazos of Ulloa, Secondary Education, Sadness of Love, Duty Shift, Central Brigade, Juncal and Delusions of love, just to name the most important ones. And they looked, imported, Dallas, Santa Barbara, Hill Street Blues, among many others. How could I not miss staying home on Saturday afternoon to watch The law of Los AngelesOr having seen as a teenager all those films that populated the film cycles? Or falling in love with One, two, three with Mayra (not even with Kiko Ledgard) when the one I really remember is the one with Jordi Estadella? I could make a list almost as long as my own memories.
In terms of programs, of course, we were not far behind either. For professional reasons, in recent months I have had to rescue myself from that happy place that is RTVE Play different deliveries of Tonight, The key, If I were president, some interviews of Thoroughly, Chat with by Fernando Fernan Gomez and The golden age, among others, and I am unable to get out of there. And when I go out, I see her everywhere, like an intense love. I was perplexed a couple of months ago at the César Manrique Foundation, in Lanzarote, watching a loop of a programme by the painter and sculptor in the eighties in which on the same night he invited Gloria Fuertes, Alfredo Kraus and Soledad Lorenzo to a set that reproduced his studio. I met Gurruchaga and saw him recall his imitation of Victoria Prego of that sketch of Travel with us and we also talk about The last supper… from 88, his delirious New Year’s Eve special of that year. My eyes lit up. Where is the courage and creativity that existed back then? Where is that mix of culture, entertainment, maturity and humor?
Nostalgic glances at the past are always selective, that is one of their traps. I celebrate a particular TV show (not all of it) that I didn’t see and wish I had seen in the years that shape a human being. But I don’t even know if I would have wanted to or been able to see it if I had been there, and I am clear that the advantages of being born later are much greater than the disadvantages. So what is the point of this sentimental rambling? None, if it weren’t for the vain hope, far beyond my means, that I retain of being able to bring something from that TV of the past to that of the future.
You can follow EL PAÍS Television on X or sign up here to receive our weekly newsletter.
#Nostalgia #television #didnt #watch