Spain gripped by soap set in dark years of Franco's rule
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Your support makes all the difference.Confounding all expectations, a Spanish soap set in the dark years of Franco's dictatorship has blown away the silence shrouding Spain's recent past to become a prime-time television blockbuster.
Surely the only Spanish soap opera without Ikea furniture, the programme's set sports a three-piece leatherette suite with spindly legs, a Bakelite wireless perched on a frilled wall-shelf, roly-poly telephones and toughened glass crockery.
The interiors evoke the lower middle-class Spain of the late Sixties, but the storyline is what has gripped the country, keeping millions glued to the screen. Cuentame Como Paso ("Tell Me How It Happened") shows, in sweetened form, the hardships, fears, ambitions and frustrations of an ordinary Spanish family struggling under the dictatorship.
The series revolves round Antonio and Mercedes Alcantara, their children aged 20, 18 and eight, and their grandmother Herminia, all striving to make their way in a world every Spanish adult remembers but few talk about.
Antonio works as a clerk in a ministry in the mornings and flops home for family lunch before moonlighting in a failing printshop all afternoon. His resourceful wife, Merche, stays at home making more money than he does running up jeans for piecework, helped by her mother, Herminia.
The couple watch with awe how their restless children strain against the social, sexual and political restraints of the Fascist dictator's rule before his death in 1975. Daughter Ines, 20, travels to London and returns wearing a miniskirt, with a long-haired English boyfriend in tow. Their son, Toni, 18, is arrested and beaten by police in student protests, then impregnates the daughter of his father's boss. As the distraught family contemplates an illicit abortion, the young woman loses the child.
The series has caught the imagination of all generations of Spaniards: those who remember Franco relish the authenticity of every detail; youngsters who never knew him are fascinated by this window on their otherwise silent and invisible history.
"It reflects where we Spaniards come from, our immediate history and what that period was like," says the director, Tito Fernandez, 71, who remembers it all vividly. "It is important that people know."
After 32 triumphant episodes, filming began this week on another 32 instalments, which will be shown from next month.
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