What a pain, Gabilondo!

The RTVE Play platform has premiered a documentary series presented by Iñaki Gabilondo about the history of the Spanish language. The program was interesting for observing how a majority linguistic community, consolidated and without threats to its subsistence, approaches the dissemination of its history out of simple cultural curiosity. Spanish does not need to defend itself or claim its existence. It occupies a position of institutional and political centrality that can be presented as a shared heritage solely due to its demographic preeminence. From the perspective of Catalan speakers, accustomed to our language being a battlefield and too often forcing us to justify ourselves to claim it, it was curious to see how the television exercise worked and if it could serve as an exportable model to other languages.

But the result of La gran aventura de la lengua españolathe exciting history of the Spanish languageThe series includes the interventions of the wise men of the Royal Spanish Academy, who explain the history. Especially old gentlemen who are not communicative on television and who pontificate. They are surely eminences, but the program would not need the most erudite from the academy, but simply good communicators. They speak of “the fascinating history of the Spanish language” but they themselves ensure that it has nothing fascinating about it. It is a program that only recites dense and boring texts, but does not think about the viewers. Unheard of. There is no effort to make it interesting, attractive, or even necessary. Anyway, it is obvious that they do not need to.