Early Spanish Television and The Paradoxes of A Dictator General

Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television
ISSN: 0143-9685 (Print) 1465-3451 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/chjf20
Early Spanish television and the paradoxes of a

dictator general
D. Manuel Palacio
To cite this article: D. Manuel Palacio (2005) Early Spanish television and the paradoxes
of a dictator general, Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, 25:4, 599-617, DOI:
10.1080/01439680500262991
To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/01439680500262991
Published online: 09 Aug 2006.
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Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television
Vol. 25, No. 4 October 2005, pp. 599–617
EARLY SPANISH TELEVISION

AND THE PARADOXES OF
A DICTATOR GENERAL
Downloaded by [University of Michigan] at 11:40 05 January 2018
Manuel Palacio
On 18 July 1936, a large contingent of the Spanish armed forces rose in rebellion
against the legally established government of the Spanish Republic. Something the
rebels had conceived of as a military coup and which often occurred in 19th-century
Spain, developed into a civil war, lasting for almost three years, until April 1939. The
military Junta commanding the rebel military government promoted General
Francisco Franco as commander-in-chief of the armed forces and Head of the State on
1 October 1936. Francisco Franco was known as the ‘Generalissimo’ or ‘Caudillo’ of
Spain ‘by the grace of God’ in the dictatorship’s rhetoric. He did not relinquish power
until his death in 1975.
The Francoist dictatorship lasted for 40 years, during which Spain underwent
a series of changes. An essentially agricultural country with limited nationwide
communications and a degree of illiteracy beyond European parameters became,
above all during the second half of the 1960s, an emergent mass culture and
consumer society of predominantly middle-class citizens. It was also the recipient
of a continuous flux of millions of tourists, who spent their holidays on the
Spanish beaches and merged their habits and idiosyncrasies with those of the
Spanish people. One could say that Spain, during the last 10 years of Francisco
Franco’s life (1965–1975) was no doubt the first dictatorship in the world where
its citizen’s lack of freedom ran parallel to the initial creation of a mass-consumer
society.
Correspondence: D. Manuel Palacio, Universidad Carlos III de Madrid, Edificio Jose Ortega y
Gasset (17), Licenciatura de Comunicación Audiovisual, C/. Madrid 135, 28903 Getafe, Madrid,
Spain. E-mail: jpalacio@hum.uc3m.es
ISSN 0143-9685 (print)/ISSN 1465-3451 (online)/05/040599–19 ß 2005 Taylor & Francis

DOI: 10.1080/01439680500262991
600 HISTORICAL JOURNAL OF FILM, RADIO AND TELEVISION
During that particular period in time Televisión Española (TVE), the

Spanish Public Television monopoly, became the principal cultural industry in
Spain and the preferred leisure activity of the citizens. However, TVE was unique
within the European context for decades as it was a hybrid station, the only state-
owned network not financed by TV licensing or taxpayers, but through advertising
profits.
This article is divided into four sections, which outline the relationship the
Spanish dictator maintained with television. The first section outlines Franco’s
encounters with the beginnings of television in Spain in the 1950s; the second reflects
Franco’s thoughts about television, above all in the 1960s; the third part focuses on
television as one of the dictator’s leisure activities, mostly in the 1970s, and the last
section points to some of the iconographic problems Francisco Franco’s television
image underwent.
Francisco Franco and the beginning of television

broadcasting in Spain
Once the Spanish Civil War was over in 1939, Francisco Franco became the key
element, naturally enough in a dictatorship, on which all television trials undertaken
in Spain focused. The motive is clear: any company that wished to launch a television
service knew that his opinion would be conclusive in order to establish the
characteristics of the chosen television model as a whole, whether it be a publicly
owned system or state-owned broadcasting service, as in the great majority of
European countries, or a model in which stations and networks are private property
as in the American nations.
A few companies carried out television demonstrations to the Francoist
authorities. In 1948, the North American RCA (Radio Corporation of America)
sent executives of RCA directly to the Pardo Palace, residence of the dictator,
an emblematic 18th-century building on the outskirts of Madrid, where they
displayed the advantages of their system. Mid-way through the year 1948,
the North American technicians conducted some closed-circuit television tests in
the presidential residence. Basically, the tests consisted of short entertainment
programmes including local comics and showmen. The tests were the result of
the mediation of José Luis Arrese, head of the Falange Española, a political
organisation with fascist inclinations founded during the 1930s that provided
support for Francisco Franco throughout the Civil War and thereafter became the
only legal party.
There are few reliable reports in existence concerning the North American
tests, which in fact were Francisco Franco’s first encounter with television.
We have, however, the testimony of some Spanish participants at the event.
Luis Guijarro Alcocer, Colonel of Marines and government official responsible for
radio present at the Pardo Palace tests declared optimistically: ‘The test was
successful. After the performance we were told in detail how television works, those
present could see themselves on the receivers. The most enthusiastic viewer of all was
Carmen Polo, Franco’s wife, she was delighted with it’.1 However, there was also
EARLY SPANISH TELEVISION 601
an opinion to the contrary expressed by Enrique Thomas y Carranza, General

Director of Radio Nacional de España (RNE) at the time. He noted that the
marchioness of Huétor de Santillán, principal companion of Carmen Polo—according
to Paul Preston the best known of all Francisco Franco’s biographers, and
an absolutely key figure during the regime who’s ‘malicious gossip could favour or
ruin any of those who made up the closed circles of the Pardo Palace’2—curtailed the
experimental tests because ‘when she saw herself on the screen with a figure that,
according to her, was nothing like her own, she indignantly exclaimed: how dreadfully
this works’.3
For a few years, the launching of a television service disappeared from the
agenda of the political clan that surrounded the dictator. From 1953 onwards,
TVE began some experimental broadcasts. The people working on them had no
idea when the broadcasts would become regular or which would be the future
Spanish television model. In fact, not only were the experimental broadcasts
conceived as technical tests, but they were also understood to be the best way
to convince Francisco Franco that a television service should commence in Spain.
In order to fulfil this second and most decisive objective, great efforts were made,
for example, to improve the reception conditions in the Generalissimo’s residence;
in 1953, the antenna at the Pardo Palace was raised, using a telescopic pole,
about 60 meters and later a special antenna was built for the exclusive use of
the Franco family, grandparents, daughter and grandchildren.4 The quality of the
image was not left unattended; in 1955 the Spanish dictatorial Head of State
received an enormous television set made in Italy by Autovox, and paid for by
RNE, which then cost about 160 euros, at a time when the General Director
of public radio and television José Ramón Alonso earned 90 euros a month.
The television set remained until his death and can still be seen today in the
Pardo Palace.
It is not known whether experimental television was an everyday event in the
Pardo Palace. However, we know that during the experimental broadcasts it was
not unusual for the dictator’s civil servants to order tailor-made television
programming. Even though life is full of surprises, it is improbable that these
petitions came from Franco himself, because most requests were for cartoons.
Juan Carlos Ibañez suggests the attractive idea that the television available at the
time—undoubtedly focussing on a model of programming entertainment and
leisure—created within the dictator a viewpoint from which he would judge the
medium in the future.5
The television service in Spain was delayed with respect to other
European countries. The TVE regular broadcasts began, only for the city of
Madrid, on the 28 October 1956 without any specific legal regulations of a
television model in place, although there were significant indications with
respect both to the political control over programmes and to vigilance over
Catholic morality.
The presence of the dictator was particularly noticeable during the
limited celebrations held as a result of the inauguration. There was the usual
‘Viva Franco’ cheering by the Ministers responsible for TVE and other Francoist
government officials and an inaugural speech delivered by the Minister Gabriel

Arias Salgado:
Today Sunday the 28th of October the day of Cristo Rey, God the King, he who
has been granted all the power of heaven an on Earth, the new studios and
equipment of Spanish television are inaugurated. Tomorrow, the 29th of October,
twenty-third anniversary of the Falange Española foundation, daily television
programmes will begin. We have chosen these two dates to proclaim the two
basic principles which must preside over and frame all future development of
television in Spain that are the orthodoxy and rigor from a religious and moral
point of view, proffering obedience to the rules dictated to that effect by the
Catholic Church and the intention to serve the great ideals of the Movimiento
Nacional presided over by Francisco Franco.6
Some of the political/technical people responsible for the television service have
outlined, always at a date far removed from 1956, the arguments they used to
convince his ‘Excellence’ the dictator to allow the broadcasts to begin. Jesús
Suevos discussed with the man that on Spanish coins was referred to as ‘Caudillo
por gracia de Dios’ (‘Caudillo through the Grace of God’), giving reasons why
Spain should not lag behind the rest of Europe.7 Jose Ramon Alonso has insisted
that he wrote a report for the Head of State in which his main argument was
based on the possible connections between the development of television and the
existence of an electronic industry suitable for defence purposes.8
Whatever the case, Franco was not sure about television. He was, similarly to
everyone else in the Spanish autarchy, unable to envisage the numerous changes
that the arrival of the new medium of communication could bring with it.
An example of this, apart from the many sceptical comments that appeared in the
press of the time, came from the qualified opinion of Enrique de las Casas, later
General Director of the first channel of TVE, who wrote: ‘we should not forget
that due to a series of ethnological and definatory reasons the Spanish people do
not seem to be born consumers of television; neither the climate, nor the
lifestyle, nor the imaginative qualities of the great majority make them good
customers for television’.9 Any comments about such categorical statements on
Spanish dialectical idiosyncrasy and television would seem superfluous.
In spite of the initial broadcasts, Franco did not give his final approval to the
development of the television medium during the first half of 1957; indeed
there were no further projects not even for television waves to reach Barcelona
either through the design of a state network or through the introduction of
a second station. Jose Maria Revuelta, who became General Director of Radio
and Television after the political changes occurring in February 1957, said that in
June of that year, during his first audience with the dictatorial Head of State,
he found the General was reluctant to develop the medium and commented:
‘I ask myself, Revuelta . . . all this business of television, will any good come
out of it?’.10
How can we interpret the doubts and ambiguous words of the Generalissimo?
Let us go back in time. At Christmas 1955; a memorable date since there was no
regular television service at that time in Spain; in his annual message to the
Spanish people Francisco Franco pronounced the latterly overused phrase:
Today I must warn you about a danger: with great ease, the media, the power
of radio waves, cinema and television, have opened the windows of our
fortress. The freedom of radio waves and print travelling through space,
enable the outside air to penetrate our windows, contaminating the purity of
our environment.11
In short, it is possible to say that the dictator’s doubts about television do not only
spring from his responsible decisions with respect to the meagre conditions of the
state treasury; which his followers have supported for decades; but also from
something deeper, from his own bewilderment in the face of the political and
economical dilemma in which the regime was immersed during the second half
of the 1950s.
In other words, Francisco Franco, given his own ideological background, would
have preferred an isolated Spain with no television, a stronghold of ancestral values,
in line with the fight against ‘International Communism and Masonic liberalism’. For,
even though Franco probably did not understand the connections that existed between
a programming type based on the Euro/American television model and the liberal
economical conceptions of the ministers, who precisely at that time were negotiating
with the International Monetary Fund the modifications in the structure of
Spanish economy that would enable the growth and development which occurred
in the 1960s, Franco was not unaware that towards the end of the 1950s something
was giving within his regime’s initial ideological approach, for he noticed the influence
North American films, and the lifestyle reflected therein, were having on the moral
and social order of the Spanish people.12
In this sense, it is possible that Franco realised that his regime could not ignore
the Western economic guidelines or the resulting television arrangements, articulated
around an understanding of television viewers entertainment and leisure. When
in September 1957 the Pope Pius XII published the Encyclical Letter Miranda Prorsus,
dealing with cinema, radio and television, in which, precisely, the Vatican supports
the development of television, the lull to which the broadcasts of TVE were subject
came to an end. The Vatican Encyclical Letter gave Christian legitimacy to the
television broadcasts. Franco understood that in this field it was not wise to run
counter current and gave permission for the medium to develop. Television in Spain
then began its evolutive process. Together with these new developments and the
advent of television programmes came the beginning of a road towards what historians
refer to as the transition from a totalitarian dictatorship to authoritarian dictatorship
with limited rights of the citizens but more permissive than that of the 1940s and
1950s. Not long afterwards; towards the end of spring 1958, a year and a half after
the first regular broadcasts had begun, construction of a centralised state network
was initiated, the first milestone being the arrival of television to Barcelona in
April of 1959.
In Spain, television was unique compared to other European models, for although
it was publicly owned, it was financed through advertising sales. Already at this date,
Francisco Franco had no significant influence on the important decisions regarding the
history of television in Spain.
FIGURE 1 Today I must warn you about a danger: with great ease, the media, the power of radio waves,
cinema and television, have opened the windows of our fortress. The freedom of radio waves and print
travelling through space, enable the outside air to penetrate our window, contaminating the purity of our
environment’ (Francisco Franco, 1955).
FIGURE 2 Francisco Franco interviewed by two journalists from United Press (1953).
FIGURE 3 In 1959 the Franco regime adorned the streets of Madrid with millions of North American flags
to impress President Eisenhower.
FIGURE 4 In the 1960s, television presented Franco as a symbolic good-natured grandfather of the
Spanish people.
FIGURE 5 Closing image of television broadcast in the 1970s.
FIGURE 6 Francisco Franco during the burial of his aide Luis Carrero Blanco in 1973.
FIGURE 7 In the 1970s the deteriorated physical image of the dictator was hidden by Spanish television.
FIGURE 8 The last and shortest Christmas message in 1974.

FIGURE 9 On 1 October 1975, the Franco regime organised a support demonstration for the dictator. The
failing voice of an elderly dictator was heard.
FIGURE 10 Censored images of the last Cabinet meeting presided over by Francisco Franco,
October 1975.
FIGURE 11 Censored images of one of the last public appearances of Francisco Franco, October 1975.
The thoughts of Francisco Franco

concerning television
If we go through the more than half a dozen volumes that constitute Francisco
Franco’s speeches and official communiqués, some of them given in unlikely places to
unorthodox groups, we would come to the unmistakable conclusion that the television
medium hardly aroused the interest of the dictator. Television was so remote from
Franco’s political thought that the inauguration in 1964 of the Prado del Rey macro
television studios (near Madrid), the only time he visited the main site of TVE, was not
motive enough for him to participate actively in the event.
Whatever the case, Franco’s thoughts concerning television were extraordinarily
simple and did not change much during his long mandate; on the one hand it
was articulated around the need to command the control of the medium’s censorship
(during the whole dictatorship in fact there was a body of censors present on
the actual sets to watch the progression of live programmes and, of course,
to dispense permissions for fiction screenplays) and on the other he displayed a
defensive and suspicious attitude when confronted with anything novel or foreign.
Apart from topics related to information control or to the moral obsessions of
a very Catholic, conservative General, educated according to the values of the
19th century, the thoughts of Franco coincided 100% with that expressed by the
Catholic Church in the aforementioned Encyclical Letter: in other words, the idea,
so recurrent in any thoughts about television, that if put to good use it can be
a formidable pedagogical instrument but if unwisely employed can be exceedingly
pernicious and have undesirable effects on the development of the most
vulnerable social sectors such as children and be harmful to public life. His doctor
Vicente Pozuelo Escudero commented: ‘Sometimes we heard him (Franco) say
that this medium, used appropriately, could become an invaluable resource for
the education of the people, and could be damaging if it were not employed
well’.13
It is not surprising that the most well known aspects of Franco’s thoughts fall
in line with the aforementioned reactionary message delivered at Christmas 1955.
However, at other times his advisors tried to reshape his thoughts to fit the
economical and social changes of an industrial Spain. For example, in 1963 he
outlined his particular readjustment to modern times:
We have to consider that even though once we were able to shut ourselves within
our frontiers and live our own lives, today we have an indispensable relationship
with the exterior; the dangers that threaten Europe also threaten us, but opening
the windows to the outside world does not mean we will allow its vitiated air
to invade us.14
Yet, even in the mid-1960s, at the height of both his personal satisfaction and
international consolidation of the Francoist regime, Franco experienced the new era
ambivalently. On the one hand he tended to accept more easily than ever before the
airs of technological modernity. During this new phase, the development of television
was connected to prosperity. So, in 1964, only two years after the first tele-
communication satellite had been launched, Franco mentioned telecommunication
satellites in some of his speeches and stated how one of his government’s objectives
was to ‘furnish the country with as many broadcast and communication media
required by the fast pace and advanced technical progress of our times’.15 However,
on the other hand if his most liberal advisors were not constantly alert, the same
recurrent obsessions would again flourish within Franco.
This is the case with the communiqué the dictator recorded to celebrate
the inauguration of the television station in the Canary Islands, with which he
nominally finalised the Spanish state network and which in fact constitutes the only
public speech made especially for the television medium. (The Canary Islands are
located at about 2000 kilometres from continental Spain.) There is nothing original
about his message. Franco, possibly influenced by the nostalgia of the surroundings,
which enabled the establishment of his dictatorship (he left from the Canary Islands
to command the rebel armies), repeated many of his hollow ideological rigmaroles
with little modern gloss. His words enhance our understanding of Franco’s thoughts
with respect to television:
The Canary Islands become, today, the new link in the chain of union which
television programmes have become within the modern world; through which
you will receive daily, and with the embrace of the mainland, the testimony of
truth from Spain and the indubitableness of its reality. I feel deeply moved to
think that through this medium the voice of the authentic Spain departs once
more from the Canary Islands, as I myself departed on that memorable day of the
18th of July of the year 1936, bearing the ideals of our Movement to hoist upright
the flag of faith and of the spiritual values, then in danger within our mother
country, as they are today in the rest of the world. As I open this new
broadcasting station, I remind you of something we must be aware of: the new
communication, information and broadcasting media have to be used to noble
ends, because the improvement and progress of technology are of no use if they
are not placed at the disposal of Truth, Justice and the real and Christian
Brotherhood.16
From another contradictory perspective, and with respect to Francisco Franco’s

use of television that will be covered in the following section, the Franco family
must have thought television was endowed with considerable symbolic value if we
think of how in 1974 Vicente Gil—who had been Franco’s personal doctor for an
exceedingly long time, 37 years in fact—was dismissed and received a colour
television as a parting gift from the Franco family in gratitude for his many years
of service: ‘I didn’t know what to send you and so, as you are a very much
of a home loving family man, we have sent you a television set’ Carmen Polo told
the physician.17
Francisco Franco as television viewer

Franco did not ignore the element of leisure and entertainment that the small
screen had to offer. His liking for television programmes materialised in the
mid-1960s; before then, at the beginning of the decade, there is some proof of his
interest in football but little evidence of his liking television. However, things
change and similarly for several million Spaniards. Franco and his wife, at that point
the only inhabitants of the official residence, became enthusiastic television viewers.
In due course, in 1966, Franco was so used to the everyday routine of the television
images that he allowed himself an ironic aside to his cousin: ‘Television recorded
how we got soaked by the rain very well indeed [in the military parade that
commemorated, during the Francoist regime, the Victory of the rebels in the
Spanish Civil War]’.18
During the 1970s, Franco became a compulsive television viewer, something
that would almost condition his private and public habits during the final years of
his life. In fact, in 1972, on his 80th birthday, his aide Antonio Urcelaiz could not
hide his concern and commented to the Minister of Agriculture, Tomás Allende
Garcı́a Báxter that Franco only went into his office when he granted an audience,
and that otherwise ‘he spent all day watching television’.19 Another example:
in July 1974, Francisco Franco was in hospital; however, after a slight improvement
on 23 July, the first thing Franco asked the hospital personnel to do was return the
television set that had been removed from his room as a medical precaution. One
could read in the news at the time, perhaps as a sign that the State was back to
normal, the following report: ‘yesterday he (Franco) went for a few walks and
asked for a television set again’.
The result of all this was that television watching overlapped with the routines
of the Caudillo who dedicated the same energy to television as to the hunting
season or holidays spent fishing. Rafael Orbe Cano, General Director of Radio and
Television, in 1973, has commented that during his travels ‘the dictator wanted
the television to be turned on as soon as he had finished his working day’;20 or
even more significantly, considering its emblematic nature, when hunting he would
even alter the timetable of the last beat for game on a Sunday hunt, in order to
see the seven o’clock football match broadcast.21
In short, the organisation of Franco’s time as Head of State, dictator of a medium-
sized economic power which Spain had become in the mid-1960s, was determined
by his hobbies and not, by any means, by his professional activities as Head of State,
or for much of the time also as Head of the Government.
Within his residence of the Pardo Palace, Franco possessed, in the 1970s, at least
two television sets (something that was obviously unusual in Spain at that time). One
was the aforementioned black-and-white Autovox, measuring about 32 inches, placed
in a room that was used by the dictator as a private sitting room, and which at one
point included a wired remote control system the engineers of TVE had prepared
for him. There was another colour television set in the dining room. It was there
to entertain anyone having lunch or dinner (at that time TVE, with two channels,
broadcast only 10 hours of colour television a week for the enjoyment of about
40,000 owners of panchromatic sets).
The dictator’s timetables for watching television were those typical of any Spanish
family, and different from those in the rest of Europe: in the 1970s he started to watch
television after lunch, at about 14:30 until the daytime broadcast closed down,
at about 16:15. Later in the afternoon he concentrated on the official meetings with
ministers or with the Head of the Government the Admiral Luis Carrero Blanco.
At prime time in the evening, which in Spain lasted from 20:30 to 23:30, the family
Franco-Polo dined ‘in their private rooms’ with the television on and stayed up until
the broadcast finished, at about 12 o’clock at night, also watching the closing images
of the Spanish flag, National Anthem and photograph of Francisco Franco, dressed
as Captain general of the Army with a smile on his face. Jesús Aparicio Bernal,
General Director of Radio and Television since 1964 to 1969, has explained that the
only indication that the Head of State made about television in general had to do with
the time the channels closed down. According to Jesús Aparicio Bernal, Franco had
said to him: ‘Aparicio, I think that the television broadcasts should end sooner,
because you don’t let us the Spanish get any sleep’.22 The General commented on
the television programmes aloud, as so many other television viewers do, when he
and his wife were half-asleep.23
Why did Francisco Franco watch television? What did he use it for? There is a
simple answer: first of all it meant relaxation and company, and filled the hours of his
lonely retirement like those of many dictators depicted in Latin–American novels;
moreover it was a source of information about current affairs. Let us see how all this
actually occurred.
All Franco’s biographers have noted that Franco was very much alone, years
before his death in 1967 when he commented to some of his colleagues: ‘those of
you, that are part of the world, could you give me some names (to fill several
political posts); I have been shut in between four walls for so many years that
I know very few people’.24 Jaime Peñafiel notes that after some of the hunts he
organised, Franco, Head of State and Commander in Chief of the Armed Forces,
would avoid the rest of guests that were engaged in conversation, keeping to himself
and drinking a Fanta, his favourite beverage, whilst he watched television with
only the company of his aides, who were under obligation to stay with him, plus a
12-year-old child.25
As pure entertainment, the television tastes of Franco were focused on sports
broadcasts and especially on football matches. However, there is evidence that he
followed, with great interest, some series like Kung Fu (ABC, 1972–1975) or Si las
Piedras Hablaran (‘If rocks could talk’, TVE, 1971), a historical documentary serial.
In the 1970s, making very few public appearances and retired from the forefront
of political affairs, Franco observed with concern how many television programmes
reflected a conception of the world that deformed what he understood to be Spanish
national spirituality. This is something that made him intervene, in spite of various
illnesses, to censure, probably for the first time in his life; the development of
particular programmes. The most outstanding instance occurred with an instalment of
the second part of España siglo XX (‘Twentieth-century Spain’, TVE, 1973), a historical
documentary serial. The episode in question was broadcast on the 1 February 1973
and was about a subject at the root of the arguments used to legitimise Francoism,
namely the elections in April 1931, which gave rise to the II Spanish Republic and the
exile of the King Alfonso XIII ( grandfather of Juan Carlos I, present constitutional
King of Spain). Although the critic of the ABC newspaper, famous as everyone knows
for its support of monarchy, catalogued the aforementioned programme as objective,
the dictator watched it with indignation, which he expressed to Laureano López
Rodó, Minister of Economy: ‘It would be impossible to create better Republican
propaganda. Everyone who saw it must have been scandalized’.26
Franco did not seem to be equally motivated to exercise his conservative and
Catholic zeal on the (hypothetical) carnal excesses of variety programme dancers.
Franco even attenuated a petition made to him in 1970 by the Episcopal Conference,
governing body of the Spanish Catholic Church, to increase the morality of
television.27 And, even though it is known that at the end of his life the family group
presented him with a biased report that demonstrated how female nudes proliferated
in the Spanish press, we do not know of any reactions to the still extremely tame
television programmes, not even when the Spanish people saw a few extra centimetres
of Spanish flamenco singer Rocio Jurado’s voluptuous body in April of 1975—a
famous event in Spanish social life that almost caused heart attacks amongst the most
eminent representatives of the most reactionary and ultra-Francoism.
The image and representation problems of a dictator

Whilst he needed it, Franco cultivated a certain visual image of himself for foreign
viewers: appearing during the Spanish Civil War in British or German newsreels, in an
interview with members from United Press conceived to be sold to North American
television (1953), and of course, in the carefully planned setting in which the
North American President Dwight ‘Ike’ David Eisenhower was greeted in 1959
(President Eisenhower was greatly impressed by the one million Spaniards that lined
the streets to welcome him). In Spain however, since Franco’s initial legitimation lay in
his military victory and in the resulting oppression that ensued, a fact that is of con-
clusive importance, he did not require specific images of himself to be aired nationally.
On Spanish television during the 1960s and 1970s, similar processes as those
developing in the 1950s also came about through No-Do, a weekly film newsreel
shown obligatorily in all cinemas. Recent research has shown how the sites
reminiscent of Francoism, and even Franco’s frequent appearances on the film
newsreel, had more to do with the construction of symbols that would circulate
attached to the formation of a Generalissimo personality cult, than with a coherent
policy to create a public image of the dictatorial Head of State.28
Perhaps that is why TVE strove, more than cinema did, to direct the construction
process of Franco’s public image, adjusting it both to the requirements of each
particular moment and eventually to history itself. There were years when it was
necessary to combine images of the invincible warrior, victor over Communism or

inspired statesman, with other pictures of Franco that had been more unusual in the
past: those of hardworking man, hunter and fisherman excelling beyond any normal
human capacity, or that of easy-going, good-natured grandfather of the Spanish
people. One of the changes brought on by these new icons was the substitution
of Franco’s photograph used by TVE to close down each night. TVE substituted a
low-angle photo, in which Franco wore an austere expression on his face and visibly
displayed on his uniform the Laureate Cross of St. Ferdinand, highest military
decoration of the Spanish State, with one that showed Franco still in General’s
uniform, but in a different position, displaying his profile and smiling, but with the
important military decoration (which he had bestowed on himself ) almost out of sight.
Later on, when the signs of age became more evident, it was necessary to reduce
the negative impact of the dictator’s decrepit and damaged physical image. In the
1970s, Francisco Franco’s appearances on TVE were relatively reduced and were
specially prepared and rehearsed. This has been recorded in the diary of one of
his doctors, Vicente Pozuelo Escudero, who safeguarded Franco’s health during
the last 15 months of his life and to a certain extent was responsible for the images
that appeared when Franco boarded a plane in Madrid-Barajas Airport or during a
Christmas message, amongst others. Neither was it unusual for certain ‘inappropriate’
public appearances to be censured, something which occurred with the distressed,
weeping picture of Franco during the funeral of his principal aide Luis Carrero Blanco,
assassinated by an ETA terrorist attack in December of 1973, or with the last public
appearance (in October 1975, only made available for viewing in the early 1990s)
and finally when the signs of Parkinson’s disease that he suffered became too visible.
Considered from a contemporary standpoint there are few television images of
Francisco Franco that have remained in the collective memory of the Spanish people,
memories that, by the way, are almost always silent, not because of the dictator’s age
old limitations as an orator, but because of the serious deficiencies of the television
archives in this country. Therefore little is left in our visual memory, except for
a few self-laudatory demonstrations that Francoism organised in the Plaza de Oriente
in Madrid, or pictures of Franco’s death and the clamour of the events involved in
the period of official mourning.
There is no doubt that the messages that Francisco Franco prepared to
celebrate the New Year occupy a privileged place within the limited display of the
Spanish people’s television memories. Following the lead taken by other countries,
the New Year messages began to be broadcast on television in the year 1962.
The television appearances were conceived as a Christmas and New Year greeting to
the Spanish citizens and were also an annual review of the most outstanding events
that had happened during the life of the nation. There was a certain tendency to
broadcast them on the night of 31 December, but later in Franco’s life it was usual
for ‘the meeting’ to occur on the 30th and sometimes there was even a Christmas
message broadcast on Christmas Eve.
The greetings did not fit unto a specific schedule nor were they part of
a self-contained programme, although they were sometimes inserted into the
prime-time news bulletin (which in Spain might be programmed at 10 o’clock).
Following the same values that that were the driving force behind the whole history of
Francoism, Spanish television introduced Franco onto the sets with a noticeable
imperative tone of order and authority which ran: ‘His excellence the Head of State
will address the Spanish people in a traditional New Year message. Attention people
of Spain . . . The Head of State speaks’. Franco did not miss the broadcast of any of
his messages and usually watched them in his hunting lodge in Arroyovil (Andalucı́a).
However, it seems he was extremely sceptical about the attention with which
the Spanish people followed his words.29
In the 1970s, the recording of messages became a veritable torment for the
television technicians, who were incapable of hiding the remarkably visible signs of
aging and the failing voice of the elderly dictator. Not even his hagiographers attempt
to conceal the numerous interruptions and repetitions during the broadcast of
Franco’s television message in 1972, not to mention the distressing and extremely
deteriorated physical image the Spanish people saw that year, and the following one,
when Franco could hardly look at the camera and did not lift his head from his notes,
his voice inaudible.
As a conclusion, one can say that as opposed to what occurred on film—where
the figure of Franco has given rise to at least some film characters—on contemporary
Spanish television, there is no room for Francisco Franco, neither from a positive nor
from a negative viewpoint. As a historical figure, it is a long time since he has
appeared in feature programs or debates to commemorate the key dates in his life
(for example those of the military uprising which triggered the Civil War or the day of
his death). No television actor has become Francisco Franco; only images from the
past have been viewed (film newsreel documentaries or Christmas greetings) in the
first season of the successful fiction series Cuéntame, como pasó (‘Remember when’,
TVE, 2001–2005), nominee for the 31st International Emmy Awards in 2003, a
nostalgic historical series, set at the end of the 1960s and early 1970s, which bears
a certain conceptual similarity to The Wonder Years (ABC, 1988). Nothing televisual is
left of someone who led Spain for 40 years.
Notes
1 Nacho Rodrı́guez Márquez/Juan Martı́nez Uceda, La televisión: historia y desarrollo
(Los pioneros de la televisión) (Mitre/RTVE, Barcelona), p. 55.
2 Paul Preston, Franco ‘Caudillo de España’ (Grijalbo Mondadori, Barcelona, 1998),

p. 742.
3 Juan Munsó Cabús, Escrito en el aire (RTVE, Madrid, 1988), p. 81.
4 Nacho Rodrı́guez Márquez/Juan Martinez Uceda, La televisión: historia y desarrollo
(Los pioneros de la televisión) (Mitre/RTVE Barcelona), pp. 191–192.
5 Juan Carlos Ibáñez, Televisión y cambio social en la España de los años cincuenta,
Secuencias, 13 (2001).
6 Gabriel Arias Salgado, Madrid Daily (29 October 1956).
7 Pedro Muñoz, RTVE: La sombra del escándalo (Ediciones Temas de Hoy, Madrid,
1990), p. 161.
1990), p. 229.
9 Enrique de las Casas, La televisión española Cine y Televisión by Renato May
(Rialp, Barcelona, 1959), p. 291.

1990), p. 164.
11 Francisco Franco, Discursos y mensajes del Jefe del Estado 1955–1959
(Dirección General de Información. Publicaciones Españolas, Madrid, 1960),
p. 122.
12 Francisco Franco, Discursos y mensajes del Jefe del Estado 1955–1959 (Dirección
General de Información. Publicaciones Españolas, Madrid, 1960), p. 339.
13 Vicente Pozuelo Escudero, Los últimos 476 dı́as de Franco (Planeta, Barcelona, 1980),
p. 35.
14 Francisco Franco, Discursos y mensajes del Jefe del Estado 1960–1963 (Dirección
General de Información. Publicaciones Españolas, Madrid, 1960), p. 406.
15 Francisco Franco, Discursos y mensajes del Jefe del Estado 1964–1967 (Publicaciones
Españolas, 1968), pp. 105–106.
16 Francisco Franco, Discursos y mensajes del Jefe del Estado 1964–1967 (Publicaciones
Españolas, Madrid, 1968), pp. 9–10.
17 Vicente Gil, Cuarenta años junto a Franco (Planeta, Barcelona, 1981), p. 209.
18 Francisco Franco Salgado Araujo, Mis conversaciones privadas con Franco (Planeta,
Barcelona, 1976), p. 473.
19 Laureano López Rodó, El principio del fin, Memorias. Volumen III (Plaza & Janés,
Barcelona, Cambio 16, 1992), p. 325.
1990), p. 566.
21 Rogelio Baón, La cara humana del Caudillo (Editorial San Martı́n, Madrid, 1975),
p. 24.
1990), p. 204.
23 Vicente Gil, Cuarenta años junto a Franco (Planeta, Barcelona, 1981), p. 146.
24 Laureano López Rodó, Memorias. Años decisivos. Volumen II (Plaza & Janés/Cambio
16, Barcelona, 1991), p. 254.
25 Jaime Peñafiel, El General y su tropa (Ediciones Temas de Hoy, Madrid, 1992).
26 Laureano López Rodó, El principio del fin, Memorias. Volumen III (Plaza & Janés,
Cambio 16, Barcelona, 1992), p. 349.
27 Cf. Pedro Muñoz, RTVE: La sombre del escándalo (Ediciones Temas de Hoy, Madrid,
1990), p. 202–203.
28 Rafael R. Tranche, Vicente Sánchez-Biosca, El tiempo y la memoria (Cátedra/

Filmoteca Española, Madrid, 2001).
29 Rogelio Baón, La cara humana del Caudillo (Editorial San Martı́n, Madrid, 1975),
p. 81.
Manuel Palacio is professor at the Carlos III University in Madrid and Head of the Media
Department. He is the author of Historia de la Televisión en España (‘History of Television
in Spain’; Gedisa, 2001) and co-author of La programación de televisión (‘Television
programming’; Sı́ntesis, 2001). He has been the television critic of two Spanish newspapers
El Sol and La Voz de Galicia, and was also a writer for the television series El arte del vı́deo
(‘The Art of Video’; TVE, 1990).

Early Spanish Television and The Paradoxes of A Dictator General

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Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television

ISSN: 0143-9685 (Print) 1465-3451 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/chjf20

Early Spanish television and the paradoxes of a

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/01439680500262991

Published online: 09 Aug 2006.

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Download by: [University of Michigan] Date: 05 January 2018, At: 11:40

EARLY SPANISH TELEVISION

ISSN 0143-9685 (print)/ISSN 1465-3451 (online)/05/040599–19 ß 2005 Taylor & Francis

During that particular period in time Televisión Española (TVE), the

Francisco Franco and the beginning of television

an opinion to the contrary expressed by Enrique Thomas y Carranza, General

government officials and an inaugural speech delivered by the Minister Gabriel

Spanish people Francisco Franco pronounced the latterly overused phrase:

FIGURE 5 Closing image of television broadcast in the 1970s.

FIGURE 8 The last and shortest Christmas message in 1974.

The thoughts of Francisco Franco

From another contradictory perspective, and with respect to Francisco Franco’s

Francisco Franco as television viewer

The image and representation problems of a dictator

necessary to combine images of the invincible warrior, victor over Communism or

2 Paul Preston, Franco ‘Caudillo de España’ (Grijalbo Mondadori, Barcelona, 1998),

(Rialp, Barcelona, 1959), p. 291.

28 Rafael R. Tranche, Vicente Sánchez-Biosca, El tiempo y la memoria (Cátedra/

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