Not even the interim president of RTVE herself hides the failure. «We have had some great successes, such as The promise, The hunter, The joker of La 1, and other bets that are turning out to be unsuccessful, such as TV days, All against 1, Let’s get along well, Afternoon plan, 10,000 days» recognized Elena Sánchez during her appearance in the Mixed Commission of Parliamentary Control of the RTVE corporation, on February 23. She added: «Television is like that; offers that like some dislike others.
However, there is one of those “failed bets” that does raise blisters, due to its cost and its format. Last October, one month after the appointment of Sánchez as head of the Entity, the RTVE board of directors authorized a series of contracts for a combined amount of 42 million euros. Among them, 5.5 million went to LACOproductora, a Prisa group company, for 13 installments of Días de tele, one of the great bets for prime time on La 1 and which meant the return of Julia Otero to public television.
The premiere of the new format was a success. On January 17, more than a million spectators attended the media reappearance of Little Nicolás. The program marked a resounding 11.5% share and predicted, finally, a solution to a strip that seemed cursed. It would be his last joy. Seven deliveries later, it has not reached double figures again and its maximum has not reached 8%. “It seems that there is not much difference with the own production,” they say from the CCOO union branch on RTVE, “the audience is not justifying the investment.”
The union, which has already been critical on numerous occasions of the outsourcing of content in a journalistic company with more than 6,500 employees, supports Julia Otero’s commitment to “solvency and rigor” and understands that she has a high cachet, but points out that “the program has a high percentage of archival material from RTVE”. depth”.
The production company after Días de tele is led by José Miguel Contreras, linked to Prisa since the beginning of his career and who in March of last year integrated LACOproductora into the audiovisual structure of the media group after years of external collaboration. Contreras himself is one of the regular commentators in Julia Otero’s space.
It is not the first frustrated investment by RTVE in formats linked to Prisa. A single installment lasted. We are going to get along well, the Ana Morgade program produced by The Pool, the producer of Andrés Varela Entrecanales, director of the publishing group of El País, who had agreed to 4.2 million for 10 installments of the show that never were.
According to the criteria of The Trust Project
