'The revolt', a cultural program?

This Thursday, the protagonists of the program La revuelta were served humor on a silver platter. They had received the resolution from the National Markets and Competition Commission (CNMC) regarding a complaint filed by UTECA, the Union of Open Commercial Television. The conflict has a strictly regulatory origin: RTVE cannot broadcast conventional advertising and can only incorporate advertisements in the form of sponsorships in programs of cultural or sporting content. The complaint started from the premise that La revuelta violated this legal framework. The CNMC contradicted this with a bewildering wording that justified the broadcast as cultural. “The program is presented by its director in a humorous key and has great dynamism”. And it added that Broncano appeared on stage “with great energy and liveliness”. The text of the resolution was so delirious that the presenter himself and collaborator Jorge Ponce made fun of the argumentative twists, for example when describing the content: “Capybaras were discussed, 'walking football' or Angelman syndrome and the actor Salva Reina and the Spanish rugby team were interviewed”. All in all, the regulatory body considered that, despite being an entertainment space, the format was not incompatible with the cultural dimension and, therefore, the sponsorship did not contravene the regulations.

Obviously, UTECA's complaint does not stem from concern about the cultural content of public television, but rather is a strategy to combat the competition that La1 poses to private channels in that television slot, especially against El hormiguero. However, even so, it is inevitable to consider that the CNMC's criterion is, to say the least, debatable. Perhaps not so much for the conclusion —which may respond to a loose interpretation of the rule— as for the arguments that support it. The report summarizes the occasional presence of topics to force a connection with issues of cultural value. But for a program to mention a rare disease, a minority sport, or an exotic animal does not precisely make it cultural or informative. La revuelta has normalized that a group of forty-year-old men talk among themselves as if they were ten, play the drums, insult each other by calling themselves "alcoholic", make jokes about drugs, or ask the guest: "Do you prefer to be eating macaroni and finding a pubic hair or eating a pussy and finding a macaroni?". When they have talked about illnesses or addressed medical topics, the next day an expert has had to correct the information they gave. Turning all this into a cultural program is grotesque. Instead of La revuelta adapting to a cultural criterion, the cultural criterion adapts to the program. If a regulatory body, out of necessity or convenience, begins to stretch the concept of culture until it fits anything, it is deactivating the real value of culture and the function of public television.