“It never crossed my mind that the program could be cancelled.” This is how Jorge Javier Vázquez’s blog starts this week in Lecturas magazine. After the cancellation of Cuentos Chinos last week and after a brief message on his social networks, the presenter has decided to open up on the channel and tell how he experienced the pressure of the audiences every day and how he is now, “the first time in 15 years I don’t have a program.”
Cuentos Chinos was one of the big bets of the new season of Telecinco. For the first time in many years, Mediaset’s main network was going to compete in the complicated access time slot with a program other than the daily summaries of one of its reality shows. However, the program that was born to snatch some audience from the great king of access time, El Hormiguero, never achieved the results that were expected. In fact, that was the brief explanation that Telecinco gave to cancel it abruptly: “Cuentos Chinos is canceled for not having obtained the expected results.”
“It has been seen and not seen,” he says, although he assures that “it helps to think that on television a cancellation is not something unusual.”
“From the time they told me about Chinese Tales until the first program premiered, about three months passed. During this time, I went through many states of mind. They told me that the fight was going to be hard, but I, a complete optimist, always answered that it would be less. than we thought. That after so many years doing television we would be able to connect again with the public. And that we could become an alternative,” explains the presenter about what the proposal to return to television was like and how he always trusted that would work.
The first Cuentos Chinos program barely exceeded 9% of the screen share, very far from the data of El Hormiguero and what the network and Jorge Javier Vázquez himself expected, who acknowledges that he “dreamed of a 13”: “That would be an extraordinary audience. The network is going through a difficult time and we had to keep our feet on the ground.”
However, the audiences fell every day until they reached 6.2% of their last program last Wednesday. Months “of uncertainty” and “agony”, as he reveals: “They have been months of uncertainty, with times in which hope predominated and others in which insecurity invaded me. I was worried about how I was going to cope if the program did not fulfill with expectations: mine and those of others. When you come from presenting a television program that has made history and hosting the most successful reality shows in this country, responsibility can become your worst enemy…”.
“Sometimes it’s difficult to think that you can’t live up to what others expect of you,” continues the presenter, who acknowledges that “the possibility of debuting the day Pablo Motos returned was never considered” and that, furthermore, He was aware of who he was competing against and that “every day they would have a powerful guest.”
Despite being aware that it was not an easy task and that he had just presented “a television program that has made history and hosted the most successful reality shows in this country,” Jorge Javier Vázquez assures that “of the three weeks he has “During the duration of the program, there has not been a single day that received less calm audiences because there has not been a single day that we had reason to cling to a minimum dose of optimism.”
Unlike when the cancellation of Sálvame occurred, Jorge Javier Vázquez recognizes that the end of Cuentos Chinos has caught him at a good moment and that he is facing “a new situation at a favorable moment” in his life.
“Now it’s time to learn to face an empty agenda free of obligations and commitments. I don’t know how to do it but it motivates me to learn. It hasn’t crossed my mind to think that I didn’t deserve what happened or to subscribe to victimhood. I don’t mind. I like to feel sorry because it seems to me a lack of respect for people who have a really bad time. They are perks of the job. A hard and demanding job in which you are testing yourself every day. It has given me a lot of joy, it would be a sign of little generosity unforgivable,” says the presenter.
