Travel back in time with the Chimes

Anne Igartiburu and Ramón García toasting the new year 2015 at the chimes of RTVE.

Almost a year ago I locked myself alone in the dark to travel back in time. I watched, one after another, the videos of the TVE Chimes from 1980 to 2022. It was an incredible trip that you can take without spending a euro. Forty-two years through as many moments. Of those who greet the camera at Puerta del Sol in 1980, some will already be shadows, memories of the living who continued without them. Others will have retired. Some of you would not have been conceived yet.

In the first videos, the execution of the Chimes was sober, and the voice-over was professional. We were told about that Europe to come. The propaganda around the dream of modernity was verbalized through the chimeras of the Olympic Games and Expo 92. Perhaps it was that mistake in the Chimes of 1990 that caused the desire for opulence to change into tackyness and bullshit. Sequins, necklines, bow ties, and Bejaran capes. Fifteen years of Ramon García telling us that, no matter how much things change, he and Jordi Hurtado will remain unchanged. The immense euphoria of the change of century and millennium. The year in which Ramontxu opposed the popular will by not saying “Happy 2005,” preventing us Spaniards from going out to the window to shout the unbeatable rhyme. What a picture the world lost.

Along with television memories, other private ones will awaken. Houses to which we will not be able to return. Friends who stopped being friends. Oaths of love brittle like wafers. Quarrels over a hake or a word. They will all evaporate at the end of the Chimes. At the end of the trip I assure you that you will be glad that there is still someone to spend New Year's Eve with. In the end, what is not shared is worth it?

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