Enric Canals, creator of TV3 and audiovisual producer, dies.

BarcelonaThe journalist and audiovisual producer Enric Canals i Cussó passed away this Saturday at the age of 73. Canals, who suffered from cancer, was one of the founding members of TV3, where he held positions of maximum responsibility, first as head of programming and then as director of the channel between 1984 and 1989.

Previously, he had been through The Country, Barcelona Diary and Radio Barcelona. It was at this station that Canals caught the attention of Alfons Quintà, who would eventually become the explosive first director of TV3, making him his second-in-command, both at the radio station and, later, at the newspaper's Catalan branch. The CountryQuintà clashed with Prisa's structure and ended up convincing Jordi Pujol that his project for a non-folkloric Catalan regional television channel with national ambitions was the best. He obtained the direction of TV3 and brought Canals on board to also serve as his trusted lieutenant.

But Quintà's dictatorial style and thirst for power drove him from the project: the broadcaster's general director, Joan Granados, dismissed him and proposed that Canals take over. "From now on, on television, rubber 2," Quintà told him on Canals, with the aim of blowing up the house from within. However, the new director was not willing to boycott the project. The squire no longer wanted to be a subjugated figure.

Quintà would end up being one of TV3's most furious critics. Furthermore, he embarked on a destructive spiral that would culminate in 2016 with the murder of his partner, before committing suicide. But that dramatic end was still many years away. Canals led the initial phase of rapid expansion of TV3, which broke RTVE's monopoly, free from the shackles Quintà sought to impose. And he did so to the despair of the state broadcaster's general director, José María Calviño, that is, without falling into the vices of anthropological television channels focused solely on expressions of popular culture. That channel was born to tell the world from Catalonia and looked the other way with a Spanish Television with a rigid structure, which allowed it to systematically win the game of agility.

Not only did the State's monopolistic desires have to be overcome. There were also those, from Catalonia, who put spokes in the wheels. In the book TV3 Objective, Canals explained how the preparation of the channel's first test broadcast, which was a success that paralyzed the country, caused concern among some of the political parties represented on the Corporation's governing council: "We had so many enemies that no one could know what was happening and what we were preparing. We decided among a group of fifteen people and not everyone. who would execute and fix their deeds.

Canals' mandate extended until May 1989. One of his last battles, alongside Granados, was to fight for the existence of Channel 33, which the State was putting every imaginable administrative obstacle to prevent it from moving forward. He was replaced by Jaume Ferrús, another of the architects of the first TV3, first as the technical brain of the entire infrastructure of the channel and later as director. In this management structure of the Corporation in the 80s and early 90s, there was another element worth highlighting: both Canals and Ferrús They came from the political left. This was something Joan Granados likes to claim, because it highlights his role as a dam against the Pujolist faction—fundamentally, those around Lluís Prenafeta and the so-called business sector—that wanted to exploit the public channel to their advantage.

After his time at Televisió de Catalunya, Canals directed the newspaper The Observer –Pujolism's attempt to confront The Vanguard with a newspaper in Spanish after the realization thatToday was not achieving that goal– and founded the production company Mercurio. With Mercurio he dedicated himself to the production of television programs and series, mainly documentary and historical content. He was a member of the Audiovisual Council of Catalonia, director general of broadcasting for the Generalitat from 1997 to 2001 and delegate in Catalonia for the Vocento group.

Among his television series and programs are Do you remember?; The days that changed our lives; That time, that country; That 1898; In the shadow of the Great War, either ACR Classification., which won the 1996 Òmnium Cultural Award for best television program. It was based on Francoist police reports on figures and institutions opposed to the dictatorship.

This series was later translated into a book. Under Control (ACR), written with Ramon Perelló. Canals is also the author of the books Do you remember...?(Sentimental chronicle), written with Joaquim Roglan; That 98, with Jordi Pujol's former press chief, Jesús Conte, and Informers. Franco's JusticeIn the awards section, in 2013 he also won the Godó Prize for reporting and journalistic essay for the work Pujol CataloniaIn 2012 he co-produced the film The perfect stranger, directed by Toni Bestard.