TV3 and the umpteenth death of culture

It's necessary to remember. Bibiana Ballbè has been running on Catalan public television for over 25 years; she has done so as a presenter, on programs such as Silence? and Illustrated bestiary, and as director and presenter, in CharacterHe also participated in the first season ofSoul and, lately, through his company, The Creative, he has promoted programs on TV3 such as Dopamine. Ballbè, despite the animosity she has provoked in the cultural sector and the controversies she has embodied, has never disappeared from our public budgets. In 2013, she wanted to inaugurate her time as curator of Arts Santa Mònica with a party to which she invited one hundred artists, many of whom declined to participate. The event never took place because the Department of Culture stopped it, but Ballbè has never shied away from the trends and a certain successful street smoke-peddling that claims the future of culture is a catwalk. All of this until arriving at Bestial, the program that TV3 premiered on Sunday and has received an avalanche of criticism online. The problem is not the character, who does not deceive the public – she is what she is – but the politicians and influential people in our media who put her in charge of that project at the time, and those who have now given her a voice and vote to certify the umpteenth death of culture in prime time in our public media. The personal lynching that has been carried out through social media in Ballbè does not help us understand the crux of the matter. In 2013, Joan Minguet Batllori spoke of it as a symptom of a certain trivialization of culture. More than ten years after this article, we could say that the debate is no longer about the trivialization of culture, but about its hijacking, its disappearance from the media.

Let's go back to the history of infrastructure. With the arrival of regional television channels in the 1980s, cultural programs were permanently on the schedule. TV3's model was the British one, where culture and "new formats" carried a lot of weight. In 2010, the liberalization of DTT, along with the economic crisis, accelerated a process of channel multiplication and sudden contraction or merger. There wasn't enough advertising to go around, things had to be re-regulated, and the cuts fell, as always, on culture. In 2023, an even more substantial change occurred: the CCMA incorporated the 3Cat brand. Some of the cultural programs have been managed through La Crida, public competitions in which the usual producers have often won—the inbreeding of the business has also affected cultural health—and those that reappear do so as a kind of pass-through with formats that are born soaked in all the tics of the content circulating on social media: clickbait, celebrities, visual and verbal exultation, newspeak and the impoverishment of Catalan... Public institutions are always late, because they are very cumbersome structures, but in an era of information acceleration, it is better to understand that "being late" can be an opportunity to do things wisely, moving away from the anxiety of success. When TV3 "platformizes" its content, social platforms are already something else; they cease to be the showcase of cultural trends and become spaces for economic-political wars, business monopolies and spaces for algorithmic management of content, that is, clickbait, financial economics, and neuromarketing. Attempting to imitate this is not only impossible due to its economic disproportion with respect to the private sector, but also reprehensible in ethical and public service terms.

In television, formats and people are key. There are people who can undo the constraints of formats (Grasset did it with the More than 324 when he converted theinfotainment On a book show, Anna Guitart turns the interview into a model of slow TV and Jordi Lara, adventure literature; Anna Pérez Pagès on Betevé transformed a magazine into a program of cultural interest, and Xesco Reverter transforms the news into a political essay), but they are an exception. Cultural professionals have been replaced by influencers that talk about everything in the same way, that exchange knowledge for appearance and argument for style. Cultural formats, on the other hand, have been reduced to infotainment or to capsules ofedutainment in a difficult-to-organize digital portal that takes the structure of thescroll infinity and where the category culture It is next to that of divulgation, synonymous with the chamber of uncleanliness. The homogenization of TV3's formats has also been fueled by the elimination of the historic Department of New Television Formats, a largely undisclosed loss.

The digitalization of Catalan public television would have been a unique opportunity to create quality content—which can also be very entertaining—that endures over time, to return to cultural programs, enter classrooms, help citizens become citizens of complex democracies, and bring unexpected ingredients—formats, voices, content—to the table. But instead, the suicidal copying of the platform model has been chosen, for tautology (the funereal circularity of characters according to the hype or fame) and by the casting culture (one face in the "digital paradise" is worth more than a thousand careers). Alienation has been chosen bestial, the formats of collective hyperexcitement, in whichinfluencer It embodies an aspirational logic based on cosmetics, class narcissism and sequins – that's what we'll leave to the young. We've gone from politics to controversy, from Illustrated bestiary to the illustration of recycled seasonal beasts – the eternal return of the same ghosts – which only demonstrate that, as that one said, a disaster is never improvised.