One of the most morbid and obscene programs on Mediaset is Code 10On Tuesday night, Cuatro showed off their style with a sordid and inconsequential story: the fights and threats between Joaquín's brother-in-law, the former Betis player, and his ex-partner. The drama doesn't matter. His only merit as a television guest was being a relative of a soccer player. He was so furious that it was hard to understand what he was saying. But there was an unexpected climax. Part of his family had doubted that he was blind, and so he decided to prove it in an exercise charged with undeniable dramatic force. We witnessed a delirious television moment: "It's been questioned that I'm even blind! And I'm fed up with it now! I'm really blind, damn it!", and aggressively put his fingers to his face and tore off the two ocular prostheses that concealed his blindness. "Look at my eyes!""He exclaimed, stretching out his hand to the two presenters, showing them the two fake eyes in his palm. The cameraman was so frightened that he suddenly opened the image to a general view so as not to show too close a scene worthy of a Greek tragedy. Nacho Abad and David Alemán, the two hosts of the program, were stunned. This act of rage surpassed all the gruesomeness they usually display in their videos. Finding both prostheses half a meter away and the guest with his half-empty eye sockets didn't amuse them so much. The man, still in a state of rage, continued with his act of sacrifice. He placed his fingers on his clear eyes and opened his tartlets to reveal that there was no doll's eyes and no possibility of seeing: "Look how blind I am! Look how blind I am!", he insisted angrily. And turning to his ex-partner, who must have been watching him from home, he shouted at her: "You slept with me and didn't notice I took off my prosthetics every night?! Liar!". And he insisted on showing his glass eyes: "David! Nacho! Do I see him?"The presenter, dismayed, asked him: "José Manuel, please put on your prosthetics. It wasn't necessary, huh…" The guest, determined to prove his innocence, even asked for a can to be brought to the set so he could pee live, so it could be analyzed to prove he wasn't using drugs.
José Manuel put his prosthetics back on, but when the commercial break came back, the show kept repeating the entire tartlet-emptying scene.
We were revisiting the television of another era, one that's outdated, manipulating guests like puppets, with the camera used as a truth-revealing machine. That man symbolized a kind of mythological hero, who used his blindness to demonstrate a higher level of knowledge inaccessible to the rest of us, a deeper truth. The spectacle, both pathetic and comical, seemed like a parody of the most infamous television, which can only be a punishment from the screen gods.
