This Europe: Poland's viewers wash Latin lovers right out of their hair

"You switch it on and it's like having sugar or saccharin pumped into your brain," says Agnieszka, a sprightly pensioner who lives in a tower block in the suburbs of the Polish port city of Gdansk. "But I don't tune in much nowadays. Not since they began to make soap operas that are set here in Poland."

Agnieszka is one of the many Polish television viewers who are abandoning TV Romantica, a television channel broadcasting a non-stop diet of South American soap operas, mainly from Venezuela. The station was once one of the undisputed marketing successes of post-Communist Poland.

According to a TV Romantica insider, one day – at the height of the station's extraordinary popularity – a technician played the wrong cassette and an episode of a Latin American soap was broadcast twice. "Our phone lines were jammed for a week with the complaints of distraught viewers," she says. These days the channel does not even register in the country's 15 most popular television stations.

Home-grown soap operas are now beating the Latins at their own game. Artur Soral, a Polish psychologist, says: "What TV Romantica is missing is a dose of humour.

"Soaps like Na Dobre i Na Zle ["In Good Times and Bad" – a kind of Polish-style Holby City or Casualty, and the country's current favourite] manage to be entertaining, amusing and quietly aspirational. People can relate to them."

Not only is the future of some of the current crop of Latin starlets beginning to look less promising – at least as far as Poland is concerned – but members of a very Polish institution, too, might soon begin to feel the cold wind of change blowing through the world of television. The lektor, an actor who reads the Polish script of Latin soaps and foreign feature films on a range of channels with the original soundtrack audible in the background, is a necessity for TV Romantica to operate at low cost.

Poland's band of gravel-voiced lektorzy, a mainstay of local programming since Communist times, could soon find that they are fighting over slices of a rapidly shrinking pie.