Jesús Quintero, in a file image. /
The Huelva communicator was admitted to the Nuestra Señora de los Remedios residence in Seville
They are going to bury the man who imposed silence on television and radio. Jesús Quintero, ‘The madman on the hill’, the man with the roaring laughter, patrician head, crazy hair, scarf around his neck, lilting voice and aura of tobacco smoke, has died at the age of 82 at the Nuestra Señora de los Remedios de Sevilla, in which he had entered in September. A respiratory condition has taken him away, although this legend of journalism already suffered from cardiac pathologies for which he underwent surgery at the Juan Jiménez de Huelva Hospital, where he was admitted to the ICU.
Born in San Juan del Puerto (Huelva) in 1940, ‘El Loco de la Colina’ had the rare ability to become so intimate with his interviewees that he got them to open up and be honest to the point of unimaginable. Master of the dramatic pause, Quintero had the knack of a psychoanalyst and a confessor. Perhaps his secret was that in addition to speaking, he knew how to listen. Another of his gifts was discovering outlandish street characters with no luck, ‘geeks’ who made the clientele laugh, such as ‘El Peíto’, his ‘in-law’, ‘El Risitas’ and others.
This dandy of Flemish workmanship, son of José and María, escaped the fate of milling cutter and cellulose worker. He tried his luck on the boards and achieved it with a bang: at the end of a theatrical show at Lope de Vega in Seville, a man from the radio called him when he noticed that his voice was projected to the last row.
Libertarian, depressive and sentimental, he made his first steps in Huelva, when he was recruited at the Centro Emisor del Sur de RNE, where he obtained a position by opposition, in the early sixties. There he stood out as presenter ‘Estudio 15-18’, which he hosted together with Marisol Valle.
But his great success, the space with which he turned radio canons upside down, was ‘El hombre de la roulotte’, which would be followed by ‘El loco de la hill’, ‘El perro verde’, ‘Qué saber nobody’, ‘ Thirteen nights’, ‘El lobo estepario’, ‘La boca del lobo’, ‘Cuerda de presos’, ‘El vagamundo’ and ‘Ratones coloraos’, programs that alternated on the airwaves and the small screen.
With a careful staging and actor manners, Quintero impregnated his soliloquies with poetic and philosophical reflections, from León Felipe he passed to Walt Whitman and from there one of those sentences that both the insomniac and the nocturnal, the drinker and the charlatan like so much.
His nickname of Fool on the Hill comes from a Beatles song, ‘The Fool on the Hill’ by The Beatles. His fate was marked by lights and shadows. From an undisputed star, he disappeared from the map, relegated by the new television, that of the ‘reality’, the ‘talent shows’ and the talk shows.
He won all the communication awards, from the Ondas Rey de España de Periodismo, and that he boasted of stepping on the newsrooms that they banned whiskey in them.
His finances began to suffer. In the recordings of the ‘Ausbanc case’ he admitted that his daughters had sued him for not paying for his studies. Things got worse, because in 2018 he was evicted from the Seville theater that bore his surname for non-payment of rent for more than two and a half years. The company that owns the premises said that he owed him 540,000 euros, an amount that he said he had paid.
Married twice, first to Ángeles Urrutia and then to the journalist Joana Bonet, he was a great communicator and a lousy businessman. The station Radio América, Televisión Babilonia and El Café de la Luna, the Montpesier, did not materialize.
He said goodbye to public television with anger in between. ‘The night of Quintero’ went to hell due to the poor relationship between the journalist and the management of TVE. He first invited Farruquito to the set shortly before he was jailed for hitting a pedestrian and running away. Then he tried to interview the far-right Ricardo Sáenz de Ynestrillas, to which TVE refused. In the end, he broke the deck when the leadership deprogrammed a talk he had with José María García, who attacked anyone who came within range, including the president of the public entity at the time, Luis Fernández.
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