'Dallas', the series that TV3 stole from TVE to make them understand who they were

Barcelona(As every summer, ARA dedicates a series of Sunday Media articles to reviewing television history. This year we rescue some of the most notable channel changes that historical fictions experienced.)

October 1982. Journalist Rosa Calaf is at the audiovisual market in Milan with the task of buying international programs for TV3, the new television that is to be launched in a few months. She goes there as director of programming and production and is the first employee of the channel, even before the founding director, Alfons Quintà, as she had started collaborating when Jordi Pujol had not yet chosen who would lead that project. She will return to Italy with a major piece in her bag: the rights to the series Dallas, one of the most important titles in American fiction at the time. And she will do so by leaving the people in charge of her former home, RTVE, who had been broadcasting the series until then, with their jaws on the floor.

Calaf could not win by budget, but by cunning. Aware that TV3 was a mouse in a jungle of big beasts, she sought the complicity of her Basque counterpart, Josu Ergüin, who was moving forward with the Euskal Telebista project. If they bought together, they could share the costs and save themselves the trouble of duplicating tapes. From there, they befriended the managers of the European subsidiary of the producer of Dallas and bought the rights. When TVE tried to renew its agreement – it had started broadcasting it in 1979 – it found that the mice had taken the cheese. And since the rights were divided not by languages but by territories, viewers outside of Catalonia or the Basque Country were left without knowing how the adventures of the Ewing family and their oil businesses continued.

That purchase sent two messages of depth to the waterline of a Spanish Television that until then had operated under a monopoly regime (because private channels would not arrive until the 1990s). First, that it had a competitor in the purchase of television rights, even if it was from the regional sphere. Second, that the TV3 that was gaining momentum to present itself would not be the anthropological television of castellers and caramelles that the director of the state entity, José María Calviño, dreamed of, but a complete channel from which to explain the world and also explain itself to the world. With news, but also football, international series, and, yes, also culture.

The rest is a well-known story. Dallas was part of TV3's initial lineup from 1983 and remained on air until 1992. One of its not insignificant contributions was popularizing Catalan in a spoken and informal register. Like when one character said “Sue Ellen was sick” and the other replied “You mean drunk.” Popular slang had been present on the street, but never represented on television with that normality.

This battle between channels had a replica in 1988 that can be viewed with some irony today. The Corporació Catalana de Ràdio i Televisió – it had not yet become “de Mitjans Audiovisuals” – was preparing the launch of channel 33 and encountered the usual administrative hurdles. Meanwhile, some professionals from Sant Cugat at RTVE had resurrected the idea of ​​making a Catalan channel, as they had already tried in vain before TV3 was born. The newspaper El País reported that it would be launched in October “with a program entirely in Catalan, considered prime time from seven in the evening until 12 at night.” One of the most powerful acquisitions to compete with TV3 was the series Falcon Crest, which appealed to an audience similar to that of Dallas and was considered the rival series par excellence: wine versus oil.

The project did not succeed. The director of RTVE at the time, Pilar Miró, was forced to resign for having bought a series of dresses that she defended were for her representation duties. Her replacement, Luis Solana, took office on January 17, 1989, and although the project had already been approved in July, less than three months later, the news arrived that the Dirección General de Medios denied the frequency to TVE-2 Catalunya and the company aborted the launch of the Catalan channel that, finally, has ended up arriving almost 40 years later. Meanwhile, channel 33 was launched in the fall. And Falcon Crest moved to the midday slot on La 1, for all of Spain and in Spanish.