"People went crazy": 25 years of the program that turned television upside down

Barcelona"Cross the catwalk!" It has been 25 years since this television catchphrase became popular. It was one of the key moments of every broadcast of Operación Triunfo, the talent show that revolutionized Spanish television and music and that this October celebrates a quarter of a century. On the night of October 22, 2001, TVE kicked off a new format that mixed elements of the reality genre, which was just beginning to emerge, and musical contests. After the third gala, when the phenomenon exploded, nothing was ever the same again, neither on Spanish television nor in the lives of the sixteen young contestants who had signed up for the program with the hope of making a career as singers.

Operación Triunfo was a creation of Toni Cruz and Josep Maria Mainat, founders of the Catalan production company Gestmusic, and they put a twist on the idea of televised coexistence, which had become fashionable a year earlier with Gran Hermano, the first reality show that had premiered in Spain. "One of the things that was most criticized about Gran Hermano when it came out is that it was people locked in a house doing nothing. They came from the world of musical creation and they thought 'wow, instead of being locked up doing nothing, maybe what we should do is have them locked up for a purpose'," explains Tinet Rubira, who was the director of the first edition's galas. Thus, Cruz and Mainat, who had a musical past with La Trinca, and who had already produced musical contests like Lluvia de estrellas, decided that the goal should be to improve as artists and that the confinement should not be totally hermetic, but rather that there would be a gala every week and the contestants would play for their continuity within a training academy.

After 25 years it would be very easy to say that success was easy to predict, but the reality is that at that time not even some of those involved in the project, like Rubira, were sure that it could work. The reason? The music industry was not at its best moment and music, in general, was not attractive for television. In fact, before ending up on TVE, Gestmusic offered the program to Antena 3, which discarded it with the argument that at that time musical programs were not liked. "It was much more than a musical program, but they didn't know how to see it," explains Josep Maria Mainat. "At the beginning of 2000 there was the problem that records were not being sold: there were leaks and you could download them without paying anything. On one hand, the record industry was not going through its best moment. On the other, television-wise, it was a time in which there had been a lot of abuse of musical performances in playback and everyone said they were not interesting. Even on TV, there was talk of something called the Phil Collins effect, that when people saw musical performances they would go to take a pee," explains the current director of Gestmusic. What made it succeed, despite everything? A casting that stole the hearts of the viewers.

Innocent contestants

David Bisbal, Chenoa, Rosa, and David Bustamante signed up for Operación Triunfo without knowing what real impact it would have on their lives. They were young people of very different backgrounds and profiles, from the orchestra singer, to the bricklayer and the girl from a humble family who helped at her father's rotisserie. Most of them had a powerful story behind them, a narrative that could make them connect with the viewers. "Rosa López was a unique case: a girl who had never left her home, depressed, with no personal spirit, who when she opened her mouth sang like an angel. Bisbal and Bustamante were good, but the one who surprised us was Rosa, and people fell in love with her," says Mainat. However, Rubira asserts that when they chose them in the casting directed by Noemí Galera, they were not looking for there to be a story in each one. "They all had a story to tell, but the goal was for them to sing. This has always happened to us. The primary goal is for people to sing, because what are you doing in a singing show if you don't sing? The first thing we have to do is sing and sing well," he argues. Musical talent was important, but the personal component was not superfluous: one of the keys to the show is the 24-hour monitoring of activity inside the training academy which, in that first season, was directed by Nina.

Operación Triunfo was not an immediate audience success. The first gala obtained a 22.1% share and 2.7 million viewers, data that at the time were not considered especially good, although nowadays, with more fragmented audiences, any program would kill to have figures like that. "The truth is that the first and second galas passed without much notice. It was from the third one that this infatuation occurred. The public discovered the characters we had, they discovered our contestants. They fell in love and the audience curve went like a rocket, upwards", relates Rubira. The third gala reached 33.3% audience share and 4.9 million viewers. The final gala, broadcast in February 2002, had almost 13 million viewers and a 68% share, figures that at that moment made it the most-watched program in the history of Spanish television. That audience record was surpassed a few months later by another broadcast that also bore the stamp of Operación Triunfo: the Eurovision performance by Rosa López, winner of the talent show, which reached 85.2% audience share.

"When you make a program you always hope it will be a success, but the thing is OT was not a success: people went crazy. It broke all the records for audience and social impact. The country was talking about nothing else but that program. Nothing like it had ever happened before and it hasn't happened again", says Mainat. For the team behind the program, the social phenomenon was also a learning process that was done "on the fly", as the creator of the format admits. "I don't remember any particularly difficult moment. Things happen and you solve them, especially because when 16 young people live together, issues always come up: some fall in love, others fight. In the end, they were all very good people", he says.

"We were a production company that was already making musical products and all that, but we were not prepared to manage a social phenomenon of these characteristics nor the thousand and one requests we received from that moment on. All the mayors in Spain wanted the town's local festival to have contestants from OT", explains Rubira, who details that at that time the production company had neither a marketing department nor a commercial department. Nor did it have a management agency that could manage the contestants' careers. "We had initially thought that, once they left the program, there would be some record label that would sign one or two contestants. But all 16 contestants were of interest. Something very huge happened. An entire infrastructure had to be created that went far beyond TV production", he recalls.

Impact on the music industry

However, the passion for the program was not shared by everyone. Many well-known faces from the struggling music industry firmly criticized the format because they believed it monopolized the record market and because they did not agree with the discourse of success that they believed it fostered. Some of those who complained at the time, such as Alejandro Sanz, ended up warming up to the program. In November 2002, a few months after the first edition of OT had finished and the second one began, several artists signed the manifesto Otro timo no, promoted by the association Journalists Specialized in Music, Leisure and Culture (PEMOC). The text called for a boycott of OT and was signed, among others, by Ramoncín, who later ended up being a judge on the contest. At the time, he explained that the manifesto was against TVE and not against the format.

Mainat assures that, despite the initial criticisms, the program contributed to revitalizing the music industry. "When OT came out, practically no records were being sold; not even the most established singers were selling records. And Operación Triunfo sold millions of records and a new audience was created, which the music industry has lived off ever since," says Mainat, who admits that the success of the first edition was "excessive" and the industry could not handle it. "They said: 'It cannot be that these kids come out of television and screw up the jobs of those of us who have been working all our lives'," he recalls. The monoculture, however, gradually diluted and, finally, the market ended up rebalancing, explains the creative.

A program that has been a social phenomenon and that has created stars such as David Bisbal and Aitana is also accompanied by urban legends and controversies. In 2005, Gestmusic managed to stop the publication of the book OT. La cara oculta, written by journalist Wayne Jamison and in which the mother of Naím Thomas, a contestant from the first edition, participated. The production company requested precautionary measures because it considered that it could "damage the honor and good reputation of the program". One of the recurring rumors that the book supposedly explained was that the expulsions were decided in advance and that the program privileged some contestants over others. "Things are much simpler and much more transparent than people think. Sometimes the contestants' relatives say 'It's just that they don't promote my child as much.' And you think: 'Let's see, you yourself are saying that this is a business; if a record label can have three Bisbals, do you think it will give up having them?'", reflects Rubira.