Manolito Gafotas will be the protagonist of the Christmas story that the SER network gives to listeners every December 25. It was announced by Montserrat Domínguez, Content Director of the station, in the program Window with these words: “Manolito Gafotas returns to the radio. Manolito Gafotas returns to SER”. It has been almost 20 years since this young man, a Madrid antihero from the south of the Manzanares River, has not been on this radio station. The best-known resident of Carabanchel has taken advantage of SER’s centenary to tell again some of his everyday stories with which Elvira Lindo, its author, introduced “social humour into children’s books when it was not in fashion”.
Domínguez explained that Lindo will come up with an “original” Christmas story. “This year it will be created by Ana Alonso, Roberto García and the whole team that puts so much work and dedication into making these impeccable stories,” said the SER Content Director.
“We hope that with the complicity of life we will have a Manolito who we do not even know if he will have a mobile phone or if he is hooked on TikTok or does not know anything about him, only the author knows. It seems to me that Manolito is immortal, what we know is that he has Carabanchel in his veins,” she added. “We are going to do it, I say it in plural because we are a whole team,” said the writer, who already in 2023 was responsible for the radio adaptation of Hansel and Gretel. “I love fiction on the radio and I wanted to repeat it.”
In 2019, 25 years passed since the publication of the first book that covered the radio phenomenon, first on RNE and then on the SER network. Since 2012, when the boy became a teenager in Best Manolo, the latest installment published by Seix Barral, the character has remained in lethargy. Although as Lindo explained in an interview in EL PAÍS: “Manolito is much more popular than me. He is a character who has a life of his own.” He has it, above all, among the little ones and thanks to the recommendations of teachers in Spanish schools. But not only, it has been translated into several languages: this child is popular in Iran and in China it has sold more than half a million copies.
“In fiction, time does not pass like it does in real life, you can have a character and time is not the same. We are going to be between 10 and 12 years old, it has been frozen,” Lindo has advanced without giving many more details. It is not known at the moment if Manolito will maintain that way of speaking—invented by its author—that crept into the speech of a generation of Spaniards and still survives. “World World”; “a rather deathly silence”; “the beginning of time”; “the Cambodian pot”; “the chicken cabbage.” Phrases Manolitesque permeated by the language of the neighborhoods of Madrid. What seems a little clearer is that it will have some relationship with technology. “But I don’t want to force the issue of mobile phones or having a TikTok account,” the writer clarified. “Manolito continues to be read and no one misses the networks or asks about his TikTok.”
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