September 13, 2001, two days after the terrible 9/11 attacks, was the date chosen by RTVE to premiere the series that has made television history not only because of its longevity -22 years- but because the path it has traveled by Tell me how it happened is the one that two generations have also gone through. Children who became adults, parents who became grandparents and grandparents who already left with Cuéntame.
Herminia (María Galiana), Antonio (Imanol Arias), Mercedes (Ana Duato), Toni (Pablo Rivero), Inés (Irene Visedo) and Carlos (Ricardo Gómez) entered the homes of millions of Spaniards that day, becoming a second mother , in a second father, in the other siblings and, of course, in the grandmother of all of Spain.
For the first time, the voice of Carlos Hipólito (Carlitos when he grew up) entered our homes: “In 1968 I was eight years old. Now they say it was a revolutionary year, and it was. At least for me. The truth is that In 1968 I wasn’t up for revolutions. I was worried about other things: I was worried that the poor fugitive was always on the run when we all knew he hadn’t killed anyone. I was also worried that the television my father had just bought wouldn’t arrive in time for the festival. of Eurovision”.
Nobody could imagine that the San Genaro neighborhood and that the humble apartment on Travesía de Tito Fernández would enter the street memory of many, of the millions of spectators who during these more than two decades have followed with emotion, with sadness, with joy, and even with suffering, the journeys of the Alcántara.
“Cuéntame is a series that stopped being a series a long time ago and is part of Spain’s cultural heritage,” Jacobo Delgado, scriptwriter coordinator for this latest season, which premieres tonight on La 1, told this newspaper, but a member of the series for 20 years. Delgado has experienced the series from within, first under the orders of great scriptwriters such as Alberto Macías or Ignacio del Moral, among others, and now taking charge of the grand finale of the series with which “we wanted to give the viewer a gift for their fidelity for so many years.
Yes, that’s right, tonight the beginning of the end of Cuéntame, the series produced by RTVE in collaboration with Grupo Ganga, will enter every home of whoever wants to see it. But “there is no sadness,” confesses Imanol Arias, our Antonio, because “the feeling we get is that of a job well done, of satisfaction, of joy.”
Delgado tells us about this ending that for him it has been “closing my own circle.” “Cuéntame has been my best school,” he says with pride, affection, but also a certain melancholy because more than two decades of work on the same series, with the same characters, without losing at any time the essence with which he was born “is tremendous “.
“Cuéntame has tried to talk about what unites us as a country,” he points out, adding that the success of so many years is that “there has been an identification with the viewer who comes because we tell about our most recent past, the one that concerns us all.” as a society to the most everyday things like the pot in which they used to cook soup”. But it is not the only key: “The other is the family and that is difficult to fail.”
Throughout these 22 years, more than 413 episodes have been recorded and more than 3,000 filming orders have been made. More than 2,000 actors have passed through the stages of the legendary RTVE series. And it has not only achieved hundreds of awards that those who have received them admit they do not know what to do with, but it has also garnered countless audience records and golden minutes everywhere. Like in that episode -Camino de Santidad- on April 29, 2004, which achieved 9.8 million viewers or its most viewed episode -Tocando Bottom- which surpassed 7 million viewers and 51% screen share. . But Cuéntame “is history for much more,” the team assures.
With Cuéntame we have achieved something very difficult, crossing the cold television screen
“What has Cuéntame meant to me? Well, look, I’ll answer it with one sentence: I started watching Cuéntame when I was 19, at my parents’ house, with my grandmother by my side, and I’m going to finish watching it when I’m 42, in my own house, without my mother and without my grandmother with me, and next to my husband and my two children. This is Sofía, one of the many followers that this memorable fiction has had. When Cuéntame started when she was studying her degree, now everything has changed… Like in the series. “I have grown older at the same time as Cuéntame,” she tells us. Like the question that Mercedes asks in the first episode of this last season: “What has happened to us?” Well, we have grown older at the same time as Cuéntame.
Ana Duato says it: “The great protagonist of the series is the viewer who is there behind and who has had the ability to see himself reflected and empathize with us. Feel that closeness because either it was his story, or it was that of his grandparents, or “It was his parents’. We have managed to get through the cold television screen with Cuéntame something very difficult.”
“Cuéntame has captured the lives of two generations,” the documentary makers of the series assure EL MUNDO. “He has managed to capture life in the houses with all its eras and all the historical events from April 1968 to 2001 – the year in which the series will end,” they add. And, in addition to the Alcántara plots, Cuéntame has done a service that goes beyond simple fiction: it has approached the recent history of Spain with rigor and respect.
“The milestone of Cuéntame is the memory that will remain with the viewer forever,” adds Imanol Arias, while holding the hand of his wife in fiction, his Ana Duato, his “milano.” “Deep down there was a need to meet the audience, with those viewers who were 19 years old when they started watching it and are now over 40, because they are the ones who made this series.”
Grandfathers and grandmothers like Herminia, mothers like Merche, sisters like Inés have sat on the sofa with their grandchildren, with their children to share their own story to the rhythm that the Alcántara family told it. While Cuéntame and those grandchildren were getting older, those grandparents who occupied those chairs, like Herminia, were losing their lives. Many are no longer here and the grandchildren are already parents. “I’m going to miss the Alcántara family a lot,” admits Ana Duato, because “I love them, we love them, and that is the great achievement of this series.”
During the meeting with Imanol Arias, Ana Duato and Irene Visedo, where the complicity between them is constant, the actor says that people are so in love with Merche, the Alcántara family that I cannot forget that time he went to Valencia, to enjoy of a Mascletá, and, suddenly, people began to scold him for having been unfaithful to Mercedes Alcántara. It was the season in which Merche and Antonio divorced. Imanol Arias thus explains the responsibility they have carried, “with pleasure”, during all these years. “They have called me Merche more times than Ana,” the actress interrupts with a laugh.
For Irene Visedo, Inés Alcántara, it is to have been part of “a miracle”, of “such an iron structure” at all levels, “both personal and professional” that takes away “the ability to put the shadow outside and learn from the darkness”. “It’s a gift,” she says.
“No one has the key to success,” says Delgado, convinced that if he had that key everything would succeed. However, he is clear that “all series are based on two things: the cast and the script.” “And this series,” he continues, “has been fortunate to have a cast of great quality” and sustained over time “which is not easy.” “A series can have great locations, great camera turns, great shots, but if there are no characters and there is no script there is no series,” he concludes. A work of hundreds of people, of thousands of faces hidden behind the cameras and that in this finale take on all the relevance.
“What I take away from Cuéntame is all those people behind it who work from dawn to dusk,” says Arias. “It’s our big Cuéntame family,” she acknowledges while admitting that now, when the last episode is broadcast, she will take a break from television and Antonio.
A series can have great locations, great shots, but if there are no characters and there is no script, there is no series.
The most successful and important fiction on Spanish television of the 21st century puts the finishing touch to a career spanning more than two decades on RTVE. Seven intense chapters will be the farewell “that Cuéntame deserves.” Each one focused on a family member, first Merche, the last Carlos. “This ending is so on par with Cuéntame that it couldn’t have been done any differently,” concludes Ana Duato. It’s goodbye to the Alcántara.
