It was the Spain of the apartment in Torremolinos and La Ruperta, the time of the Tacañones and the gorgeous secretaries; the era of Kiko Ledgard and Mayra Gómez Kemp. Everything was within reach. For the affordable price of 25 pesetas, the Spanish lived the dream of a circus that brought the family together around the television every week, from 1972 to 2004, although there were interruptions in that half century. In the Spain of the two channels, TVE-1 achieved audiences of 25 million viewers with the aforementioned invention, something that football broadcasts are not even remotely able to achieve today.
Such was its popularity that the program coined its own language, made up of catchphrases and set phrases. “Up to here I can read”, as Mayra would say. 50 years ago today, on April 24, 1972, an athletic prankster, hair straightened with fixative, French surname, name of roasted corn and mismatched socks presented himself to the audience to break the schemes of television history. To celebrate, TVE 2 will broadcast on Monday the last program of the first season, presented by Kiko Ledgard and which could be seen on April 30, 1973. The same network also offers Gómez Kemp’s debut as presenter of the program on Thursday , back in 1982.
One could see everything in ‘Un, dos, tres…’, from the unintelligible muttering of Mariano Ozores to a voluptuous Bombi that inexplicably made every quisqui recite that “Why is it?”, the abracadabra of carpetovetonic eroticism. Participating in the contest was not synonymous with success. The very clever Chicho Ibáñez Serrador, creator of the program, could saddle the staff with a cow, a horse or a vacuum cleaner as a lousy prize and stay so wide.
In a dictatorship or a democracy, with or without an oil crisis, with a victory for the PSOE or the PP, the real ambition was to win an apartment on the beach, an appetite that already anticipated the brick fever that came later.
Kiko Ledgard, a Peruvian patriarch with eleven children whose mother-in-law was kidnapped and murdered, returned to his native Peru and had the idea of balancing on the railing of a hotel terrace. A bad step. The ‘showman’ crashed from a third floor to the ground, lost an arm and took three months to recover his memory. Who would replace him? After thinking about it a lot, Chicho chose Mayra Gómez Kemp, who had already made a name for herself as an actress in the space and had just presented 625 lines and Dabadabadá. «I think Chicho chose me for my memory. When there was no earpiece or telepronter, I was never wrong. I knew my script and that of others. In addition, being a woman, comparisons with Kiko were going to be difficult.
skirts and necklines
‘Un, dos, tres…’ was born in 1972, in the throes of the dictatorship, very concerned at the time by the length of the skirts and the necklines of the hostesses. Something very infrequent happened, and that is that a censor, Francisco Ortiz Muñoz, remained on the set to ensure the correct size of miniskirts and necklines. With Chicho he had more than one disagreement and in the end he could do nothing to prevent the hostesses Agatha Lys and Blanca Estrada from enlisting in the uncover cinema.
Between the attractive secretaries and the exuberant Fedra Llorente, Bombi, Mayra Gómez did not know what role to adopt. “I had to be very careful in how I related to the girls, because I did not want to give a lesbian tone,” confesses the presenter.
Ibáñez Serrador and his team, in the first stage of the contest. /
With democracy, visible censorship disappeared and Don Paco, the television Torquemada, was dismissed by Chico himself when he accepted the position of broadcast director. Quite an act of poetic justice. But in the offices of Prado del Rey the conscientious observance from above continued, although with a different aspect. “There was a lot of interest in the scripts not having political references,” says Gómez Kemp.
In ‘Un, dos, tres…’ anything could happen. The public was stoic, stubborn and spartan, enduring inhuman working days that, due to a simple technical failure, could end well into the morning. “We begged the public not to leave, it was two in the morning and people wanted to leave,” recalls Mayra. As director Fernando Navarrete recalls, Ibáñez Serrador had takes repeated until he achieved what he wanted, and that the performances were rehearsed a lot. From on high, like a cathodic demiurge, he intemperately gave orders. Gómez Kemp was a victim and witness of his authoritarian outbursts, although today he exonerates them. «There are no geniuses if they are not authoritarian. It was demanding, yes.”
elephants on set
Unforeseen things always happened. One day Chicho sent for a trained elephant that had just given birth. To put together a number, they decided to mount Raúl Sénder on top of the plantigrade, but since it was so big, it was decided that it would be better to climb on top of the calf. The tamers hadn’t warned the comedian that the little elephant was untamed, so when Sender perched on their backs and coaxed him to move, the animal thrashed and tumbled. Hearing the cries, mother elephant broke moorings, stepped on lights and threw cameras to come to the aid of her baby. «I was petrified, I was so scared that I couldn’t move from the stairs, where Chicho’s assistant director, Gregorio Quintana, current executive producer of an important production company, had pushed me».
The contest was a formidable quarry from which actresses and hostesses emerged, such as Victoria Abril, Paula Vázquez, Lydia Bosch or Silvia Marsó. The same thing happened with the comedians, who used a humor as white as Ariel. Joe Rígoli, Beatriz Carvajal, Arévalo, the Sacapuntas duo, Juanito Navarro, Las Hurtado, Manolo Royo were the comedians of the program at different stages. The Spaniards laughed at anything, whether it was with the piticlín, piticlín of Mustache Arrocet or the hilarious mime of Tricicle interpreting ‘I’m a scoundrel, I’m a gentleman’, by Julio Iglesias.
“I had to be very careful how I related to girls, I didn’t want to give a lesbian tone,” says Mayra
As for the presenters, Jordi Estadella and Miriam Díaz-Aroca (1991-1993) took over from Mayra, not without pain from the Hispanic-Cuban, who found out about the news from the newspaper. Estadella and Díaz-Aroca were succeeded by Josep María Bachs (1993-1994) and Luis Larrodera (2003-2004).
Renowned horror film director –his ‘Stories to keep you awake’ left half of Spain sleepless– Ibáñez Serrador had his qualms when he was commissioned to create a popular program. However, he had the wisdom to bring together in a single space the three types of contest: knowledge, physical demonstrations or skills, and psychological tests. The contest, which used to last two and a half hours, had a vibrant five-minute epilogue, when a couple played it all or nothing.
Fernando Navarrete remembers that the broadcast of the first two programs did not garner public favor, but then Chicho corrected course and ‘Un, dos, tres…’ came back. “Chicho was a genius. He always had in mind to improve the product ».
It was not the first time that a contest distributed great prizes. ‘A million for the best’ already did it, for example. But this and other spaces threw the house out the window once a year. Chicho was so generous that he did it every week, in a big way and without complexes, like a mayor buying masks.
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