It was the year 1995. One of the programs that was going to make history came to La 1: The Grand Prix. For 10 years, a total of 238 towns and more than 7,000 people participated in a program that reached audience figures of more than 36%. Yes, those were different times, it was a different type of television and, above all, it was a different type of consumption. However, since 2005, a wave of followers of the program continued every year demanding that RTVE return to El Grand Prix. It never came to fruition, until today.
In a few days the filming of the new Summer Grand Prix begins. Ramón García is back, bowling is back (now super bowling), the crazy trunks, the hot potato, the dictionary, the towns in conflict… And all thanks to Ramón García himself and the legendary Italian producer and general director of EuroTV (Grupo iZen ), Carlo Boserman, who for many, many years has been trying to get the RTVE leadership to give the green light to his return.
For Ramochu, the Grand Prix was almost an obsession. He tried it in every possible way, he was even about to take it to Twitch at the hands of Ibai Llanos, but it did not quite fit in until the current management of RTVE and the Board of Directors of the Public Corporation said ‘go ahead’.
“There have been several RTVE directors in these 18 years that did not want The Grand Prix, who said that it was a program from the past, that they did not see it, but this directorate has said that it will go forward,” reveals the presenter.
Ramón García cannot avoid tears. He confesses that he never watches his old shows because he gets too excited. He had never seen The Grand Prix again. So when RTVE broadcast the nostalgic video of those years, Ramón García couldn’t handle the emotion. “One of the things I’m doing The Grand Prix for is so that my daughters see me doing it,” she said through tears, while receiving the consolation of her two new companions at the helm of this renewed Grand Prix: Michelle Calvó and Cristinini.
“I’ve been moved by watching it. It’s just that it’s been many years. This program began as When the Sun Heats in 1995 and when you look back you see that this program is sewn to the life of each one, of each summer. There were 11 consecutive summers and When you see those images you get emotional and above all, what a fucking deadline!” says Ramonchu.
In fact, Ramón García, who for years received hundreds of offers from the participating towns to give the proclamation of the festivities, says that he never accepted “despite the fact that it was paid very well.” He couldn’t be in all of them and he didn’t want to do anything ugly. What he did accept once, “and got messed up”, was to visit Cudillero, the first winner in the history of The Grand Prix.
He was spending the summer in Bilbao and one day he told his wife that they had been invited. And there he went to spend a weekend. When he arrived he couldn’t believe what had been set up. Thousands of people blocked the entrance to the town, the Civil Guard waiting for him, he in a simple T-shirt and jeans while the mayor and councilors waited to receive him. “There was even a gala dinner, fireworks… The host!”
That was always one of the objectives of El Grand Prix, to give visibility to the smallest towns in Spain, “and now with more reason with Spain emptied.” But he has not been the only one.
The new Grand Prix wants to unite nostalgia with new languages. “The best thing about The Grand Prix is ??seeing it as a family,” says Ramón García. “Television 30 years ago was seen differently. Then there were no social networks and curiously everything has changed these years, but watching this program with the family is the emotional base. Will we be able to get the family together again in front of The Grand Prix? I think so,” he says.
Hence the idea of ??having Cristinini. The Grand Prix wants to attract a young audience. That is why the streamer will have her own cabin on the set of El Grand Prix from which she will broadcast each of the tests for social networks. For her part, Michelle Calvó will be the Ambassador of the peoples. She will be in charge of telling her story, her people, the emotion during the program. That hasn’t changed though. As Ramón García says, Michelle and Cristinini are “my girls”. Women who grew up watching The Grand Prix and who unite Ramón García together with the two generations.
She will be the expert of the localities and will approach the stands to speak with the participants: “I will be with them living their emotions and nerves. And also letting the public know about stories that are going to move a lot”, Calvó told, who changes the interpretation by El Grand Prix at least this summer.
Carlo Boserman tells that precisely this has been the most difficult: “Uniting yesterday with today without losing the essence”. The Grand Prix has everything its ancestor had -heifer included-, but adapted to new times. “That has been the great challenge. It has been a difficult challenge, complicated because the essence of the program had to be maintained but with a 2023 language.”
That is why the first set designs in which large screens were placed did not like the producer. “That wasn’t The Grand Prix,” he says. The 90’s show had a kind of boat deck as sets. Today’s, the one that did fit, is a set simulating town houses as if they were a comic. “This yes,” he repeats. The famous melody has also been maintained, but with other more modern chords. And, of course, the most mythical tests that will be combined with new ones such as The Nursery, The Gymkhana, The pilot dog, Crazy bees and Climb as you can.
And in the middle of all of them the heifer. “The heifer is going to bother”, says Ramón García. “What were the heifers doing in the first Grand Prix? Annoy. Well, that’s what it’s going to do. What we were clear about is that we couldn’t remove the cow, but we couldn’t have it real on the set due to the new animal protection law So, we thought about finding a formula to maintain the essence of the heifer, which is annoying. She’s going to participate in many games. She’s quite a ball player.”
Dressed in the style of the American NBA mascot, the heifer will come out to annoy the players when the mayors decide to use a wild card. In the first game of each program, the wildcards that each of the teams will have will be decided: two for the winner and one for the loser, or one for each. They will be able to activate them by pressing a button that the mayors will have in front of them just before each game. After a five second countdown, if no one decides to press the button, the game will start; if they press it, a great mooing will sound and colored lights will give way to the calf.
The heifer is a man disguised as a heifer whose job will be, in effect, to touch the balls of the towns that compete. And, as was the case in The Grand Prix of the 90s, the absolute protagonists are the towns with between 5,000 and 10,000 inhabitants. Eight towns of the 120 that wrote to the program have been chosen: Aguilar de Campoo (Palencia), Alfacar (Granada), Brión (A Coruña), Cervelló (Barcelona), Colmenarejo (Madrid), Los Montesinos (Alicante), Tineo ( Asturias) and Yepes (Toledo). The two that will premiere in the first program, although the broadcast date is still unknown, will be Alfacar and Colmenarejo.
“More towns have written to us than those that could enter and we had to make a pre-selection so that the majority of the Autonomous Communities were represented,” explains Boserman. In addition, the municipal elections on May 28 further complicated the production of the program, since we had to wait for changes in the governments of the towns and they did not accept to participate in The Grand Prix, which caused the election to be delayed. of the participants, which was carried out before a notary.
The dynamics of the contest remains the same. Two towns that for more than two hours face the different tests, encouraged by their neighbors and that are adding points in the ranking of the program. Unlike the previous Grand Prix, this time there will be two semifinals from which the two finalists will emerge. The prize, although it was never very important in the contest, is still an economic prize, but conditioned on the fact that the money earned must be used to improve the town. That’s how it was in the 90’s and that’s how it will continue to be.
And the big news: Niko and Willbur. It is difficult to explain what is the role of Niko, the dinosaur and Willbur, a kind of athlete who will reconstruct the tests that the residents of each participating town will have to do. In addition, he will have one goal: to find his own town. As he explained, he is “a fan since I was little, I loved the Grand Prix. I’ve seen it with my parents and my dream is to be able to compete. But I don’t have a town. I’ll do the tests, I’ll let myself flow…”
RTVE’s explanation is that Niko serves to attract the little ones in the house. He will be in the gymkanas and in some of the games bothering the players before finishing the test and interacting with Ramón, Michelle and Cristinini. We will see him as both a dinosaur and a dragon, according to the test.
According to the criteria of The Trust Project