On Tuesday, in the Nights without fiction, TV3 offered Catalan to the rescue, a special on Catalan to assess its health and the future that awaits it. Presented by Agnès Marquès, the format was clearly designed with an obsession to avoid falling into pessimism or drama. Beyond the experts in the field, with a good repertoire of sociolinguists, teachers and philologists, it had a bit of everything: humor, celebrities, music, dissemination, reporting, interviews. All of this made up a series of approaches to different aspects of Catalan.
The reports that collected the responses of teenagers from different institutes in Catalonia, from Lleida to Terrassa via Vic, were very revealing. "With friends we speak Spanish because it is more comfortable", "My friends at home also speak Catalan, but since we speak Spanish at school we have stuck with it", "When a girl speaks to me in Catalan, automatically... prick!", "As they force people to speak it, this generates rebuig to the language", "As it paints the thing, I thought that Spanish will be more important", some of the nois and noies interviewed say. The time to speak was correct. Hauria is to know in what way the television and the professors are going to propose to participate. It is interesting to have in compte with those who have the Catalan as a secondary or dispensable, given a television situation in which it was supposed that they could express both freedom, all of them will try the Catalan. That
The experiment with Pere Arquillué to walk around Barcelona and see if the use of Catalan could be maintained throughout a day was very well thought out but perhaps it was not very representative. "The experience was good," concluded the actor after the experience. It is necessary to take into account how the presence of a camera conditioned the environment. Perhaps more could have been taken from an experiment of this nature. If the presence of the camera had not attributed authority to the protagonist, would the sellers or waiters have acted in the same way? What would have happened if Arquillué had asked for the menu in Catalan in a restaurant where they serve it in Spanish? Or had he gone to visit the emergency room of a hospital? Or had he given a Zumba class in a gym? Catalan to the rescue It was a well-executed, entertaining and informative programme, but above all it prioritised a friendly and conciliatory attitude that at no time showed the tensions or everyday conflicts that can arise when one claims the right to speak or be attended to in Catalan. A public service programme, necessary and interesting, made for viewers, of course, who are already convinced of what they were being told.
