Now almost all of them are the prey of thematic channels and platforms, driven by Turkish passions, but there was a time when Venezuelan soap operas dominated the Spanish-speaking world. The first one to land in Spain, with the effects of a meteorite, was Glassa successful production of Radio Caracas Televisión released in 1985, which arrived on RTVE’s programming on December 4, 1989. That day, at 5:30 p.m., Felipe González was undergoing his third investiture debate in the Congress of Deputies. He had the new leader of the opposition, José María Aznar, in front of him. And, on the other side of the screen, on the second channel, an audience that had just attended the 40 minutes of the first chapter of the seriesa compendium of bad decisions, classism and poor sound.
These were the last months of the solo reign of public television and the new soap opera was coming to replace the Brazilian serial Mrs. Beijawhich was broadcast on the second channel at around 5:00 p.m. with an average of four million viewers a day. The idea was to continue entertaining the audience in that afternoon slot with what seemed like another television soap opera, but it quickly became a social phenomenon. The talk of the town was the only thing people were talking about in markets, homes and offices. The twists and turns of the romance between Cristina and Luis Alfredo, with its entire chorus of supporting characters around Casa Victoria, the fashion company owned by the villain and mother, were of great interest to children, parents and grandparents at all levels of the social ladder.
Yes, Spain had already embraced the glamour of privilege that American productions such as Dallas, Dynasty and Falcon Crest. And the Mexican tear of The rich also cryanother of the successes of the open morning slot to compete with the emerging private channels. But Glass It was something else. Did we recognise ourselves better in that mirror? Was it easier or more fun to make a moral judgement in the face of that broad brush of clichés? The Cuban Delia Fiallo, the famous author of the script and dozens of successful serials who passed away in 2021, explained the magnetism of the plot by the shameless exploitation of emotions in turbulent waters. “To write a good soap opera you have to make people suffer, cry and laugh,” she said. In that previously unknown sentimental pool we allowed ourselves to splash around together for 246 episodes while, in the outside world, the Soviet bloc was unraveling irremediably. The long-awaited end of the drama, after that wedding and those ineffable dresses, was also, on November 19, 1990, the day we buried the Cold War.
A new accent
I don’t remember at what point in the plot the wave hit me, I only know that, in that last year before taking the leap into the university void, my group of friends at high school passionately adopted the vocabulary of those characters with musical and affected diction whose adventures we couldn’t stop following. Like an unexpected gift, the fascination with Glass opened our ears to other Spanish accents uncovered by dubbing. We learned to use dude, closet, cool and that my love which replaced any name. And we empathize to the death with poor Eli, sister of the leading man, seriously injured in a traffic accident along with her ill-fated boyfriend Gabriel.
In an article published in this newspaper in August 1990, Fietta Jarque spoke, without us knowing it, about us: about that “invisible part of the soap opera, although not the least exciting: the commentary with friends. A new assessment of the facts and some predictions for the next episodes.” Without social networks or the shadow of the Internet, those parallel layers of humorous conversation that we now call memes flourished every afternoon, with coffee, in the bar that we called Cheers in homage to that other American series that also made us happy.
It was precisely Cheerswhich was broadcast in the afternoon on La 1, the series that Glass It was replaced in April 1990, after a failed move to the midday slot that caused avalanches of protest letters in TVE’s mailboxes. Normal: more than eight million Spaniards reserved a time from Monday to Friday during their after-dinner hours or programmed the recording on those prodigious VHS players so as not to miss a single detail. These schedule changes were not acceptable. No soap opera had ever reached those stratospheric numbers of followers that made it worthy of even a Waves AwardAccording to the review published by EL PAÍS, the last episode was watched by 8,630,000 viewers, 85% of the audience.
The whirlwind of citizen attention that turned Glass In our gold standard of soap operas, an unusual collateral character appeared: Doña Adelaida, played by the journalist Rosario González Miranda, who commented on the plot on TVE before each broadcast; and what can we say about the singer Rudy la Scala, interpreter of the famous musical theme My life is you which accompanied each episode (with a video clip of the aforementioned in the final credits). There is a segment of the Spanish population, now dwindling, that today could recite that chorus without blinking.
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