Fourteen years is a lifetime and goes a long way, but Save Me won’t make it to adulthood. The new leadership of Mediaset has made the decision that for several months has been suspected in all television gossip. A few days after celebrating its 14th birthday, Sálvame has come to an end. Mediaset has put an end to one of the longest running programs on its grid, after a year of tug of war between the program and the new management of the audiovisual group.
During all this time, Sálvame has been the leading afternoon program on Telecinco, a television phenomenon that was not born to become it. Nicknamed Gulf by its members, Sálvame premiered weekly on March 19, 2009, late night after the first Survivientes 2009 gala. That first program marked audiences that surprised the management of the chain and the production company itself, La Fábrica de la Tele: a 25.8% share of the screen and almost one million followers (976,000).
The intention was not to turn that Gulf into what we know today, but rather to make a humorous and carefree program in which the edition of the survival reality show was discussed. However, soon, the anger, the live fights, the craziest and most unpredictable shows displaced the original content of the program. A new television format was born.
The controversies were the germ and essence of Sálvame from the beginning and with them overwhelming audiences with a totally unexpected profitability of the space. This led Paolo Vasile, CEO of the group at that time, to find a new space for it that was not late night. On April 27 of that same year, the chain decided to locate the format in weekday after-dinner sessions under the name of Sálvame diario with a very clear rundown that little by little was diluted: content focused on reality shows that were broadcast on Telecinco by back then.
The after-meals had been soulless after the cancellation of Here there is no tomato and Mediaset found the best substitute, a kind of magazine in which everything had a place: reality shows, fights, everything that could be imagined and what not. With astonishing speed, it became the authentic goose that laid the golden eggs for Telecinco. Finally, what began as a talk show was swallowed up by that bizarre show that was often uncontrollable.
Save me became a reality show in itself. The collaborators were the characters, their fights were the topic of the day, their controversies were what filled five hours of broadcast and you could see from two members of the program breaking their faces to a porn actress staying naked in full direct or the presenter himself putting on an Isabel Pantoja dress to sing My way. Save me was nothing without his polemics and his polemics were nothing without Save me.
The first of them came just four months after landing on the desktop. On July 23, 2009, Pipi Estrada and Jimmy Jiménez Aranu starred in one of the worst moments in the history of the program and, probably, of television. After a heated confrontation live, it was at the end of the program when Pipi Estrade attacked Jiménez Arnau. A full blown tangana.
The containment that both maintained live was completely lost when the two collaborators left the program. While Jimmy Jiménez Arnau stayed in the corridors of the Mediaset studios talking to two colleagues, Pipi Estrada left through the same door possessed by rage. A comment from the former broke the tense calm maintained minutes before. Pipi Estrada pounced on Jimmy who fell to the ground, while Estrada stepped on his head “like a moron.” Those images spread like wildfire. The sports journalist was fired from Sálvame, although years later he would return, and both ended up in court.
Those were other times, the times of anything goes, of the show at any price. However, although the pressure from the audience diminished scenes like those of that fight, the confrontations would not end until many years later. The sanbenito of “trash TV” has always accompanied Sálvame. But while many described it that way, the audiences continued to grow and every afternoon for 12 years -it has only lost viewers in the last two years-, Sálvame brought together almost two million people in front of the television.
With the leitmotiv of a “live” and “risky” program, not only serious situations such as Jimmy Jiménez Arnau and Pipi Estrada have been experienced, but many others in which Sálvame managed to stay on everyone’s lips, even those who did not see the program.
Memorable is that afternoon in which Pedro Sánchez entered the program live. Jorge Javier Vázquez, the master of all controversies and host of Sálvame, released one of his striking speeches against El Toro de La Vega. In that speech, Jorge Javier Vázquez showed his disappointment with the PSOE. At that time -year 2014- Pedro Sánchez was the recently elected general secretary of the party and, as he himself recounted in his book Manual de resistencia, when listening to the presenter so indignant with the party of El Toro de la Vega and making visible his boredom with the game, Sánchez was clear: he picked up the phone and called. According to his account, it was never his intention to go live and he just wanted to talk face to face with the presenter. Gossips say that he knew exactly what he was doing.
That call in which Sánchez promised Jorge Javier Vázquez that he would “never” see him in a bullfight was a master communication move. Save me was the most watched program in the afternoon slot and with a very sweet tooth for politicians, those over 60 years of age. Sánchez himself recognized it some time later: “Even if it were true that Save Me is only seen by older and uneducated women, how much is their vote worth?”
Of course there are few controversies in recent years in Sálvame in which Jorge Javier Vázquez is not present. A staunch defender of the program, of his work as an accompaniment to the loneliness of many viewers, Sálvame would never have been Sálvame today without Jorge Javier Vázquez, with the good and the bad.
When the new CEO of Mediaset, Alessandro Salem, promulgated his new Code of Ethics for all group workers, two points pointed directly not only to the program but to Jorge Javier himself. On the one hand, the ban on talking about politics in entertainment programs unless there is a table for that purpose and, second, the ban on criticizing and attacking other Mediaset programs. The presenter has been a standard bearer for both and has always defended it with pride. How many times has Jorge Javier Vázquez shown his antipathy and animosity towards right-wing parties? How many times has he criticized, even the very leadership of Mediaset, for not receiving the same treatment as, for example, Ana Rosa Quintana -coincidences of life now his replacement-?
History of television is the phrase Vasile himself, at that time CEO and maximum protector of Sálvame, punished him with silence and indifference. That “this program is for reds and fags. Period. Who doesn’t want to see it, don’t see it!”. Not to mention the day, after returning from one of his vacations, when the presenter looking at the camera went directly to the leadership of the audiovisual group demanding that they defend him and respect him and his program as they did with other presenters, ” as they do with Ana Rosa Quintana”. In fact, he himself has acknowledged that he reached a point where he wanted to quit. He did not want to continue fighting this battle.
But Jorge Javier has not been the only presenter marked by the controversy. Although he has always been number one in Sálvame, many days, due to his other obligations with GH Vip or Survivors, he was replaced by Carlota Corredera or Paz Padilla. The first ended up leaving television after being marked by the docuseries of Rocío Carrasco; the second was a polemic factory. Every time he left the script or the set list, it was a new day of Save me on target. The last and final one, on January 20, 2021, which was settled with his sudden dismissal and his departure from Mediaset.
That day, Belén Esteban could not keep quiet anymore or keep the decorum that a collaborator should foreseeably have with a presenter. The statements that days before Paz Padilla had made in a live on Instagram in which she questioned the efficacy of vaccines against the coronavirus caused Belén Esteban to turn red in Sálvame. After a heated discussion, one more in the Sálvame universe, Paz Padilla left the set without prior notice an hour and a half before the end of the space. She was not yet implementing the new Mediaset Code of Ethics that prohibits this practice for presenters, but La Fábrica de la Tele and Mediaset did not hesitate for a second: Paz Padilla was immediately fired. Of course, it did not last long, months later and after a tour of interviews on other channels and programs, the doors of Telecinco reopened for her.
It did not matter her denialist tone about the coronavirus, her stampede from the program, her more than commented references to death or her defense of dubious alternative therapies such as biodecoding, Paz Padilla returned home. One more controversy in the revolver.
But, without a doubt, and sources close to the program have made it known, what has caused the most damage to the program has been the so-called Operation Luna. One fine day on one of the live shows, Belén Esteban would blurt out “I can’t talk about this.” Only those who were in there knew what he was referring to: Belén Esteban was one of the 140 famous people who, according to the case summary, had allegedly been spied on by Gustavo González and from whom confidential information was requested from the police officer Ángel Jesús Fernández Hita to generate television content.
The bullfighter Julio Aparicio. The singer Isabel Pantoja, Belén Esteban, José Ortega Cano, her son José Fernando and his nephew Óscar Romero. The journalist Gema Serrano, Kiko Matamoros, Di Stéfano, Alex Casademunt, Kiko Rivera. The singer Omar Montes and many more. So many, that the appearance of many of them has led to endless appeals before the Provincial Court of Madrid, which has stopped the end of the investigation. The issue was never discussed in the program, but it led to the dismissal of Gustavo González, a police investigation with Sálvame at the center of it and the beginning of the fall of a giant, the fall of Sálvame.
According to the criteria of The Trust Project
