This Monday, television screens all over Catalonia broadcast an historic moment: public broadcaster TV3 showed a cunnilingus at a time which - supposedly - is family-friendly. Is that so outrageous? Well, actually, that's not even the half of it: the menjada de petxina was not only explicit, but during the act, the protagonists spoke a breathy Spanish. Yes, yes, that's the shocking truth of it. In TV3, la nostra - our very own Catalan-language public channel - they were speaking that.
The truth is that TV3 premiered its series Drama and our planet Earth, although some may find it hard to believe, has continued to orbit the Sun. The series, co-produced by Spanish public television RTVE and Catalan producer El Terrat, tells the adventures of three Millennial friends, Àfrica (Elisabet Casanovas), Scarlett (Júlia Bonjoch) and Jordi (Artur Busquets); although the main plot line - the Drama - is that the first of the three has an unwanted pregnancy.
Sounds good, right? Well, if it sounds good, it's because it is good, although hundreds (or maybe thousands) of viewers have a knot in their stomach because, against all odds, their channel of reference did not give a voice to the same people – no need to name them – who have been circulating in the Sant Joan Despí studios since 1983.
A lot can be said about Drama, and the truth is, after watching the first two episodes, I can only think of the positives. One such point, just as an example, is that it speaks openly about abortion, a topic that remains taboo in many homes in our splendid, effective, and superior country. If you don’t believe that, here’s a fact: in 2018, 80% of Barcelona women didn’t know that abortion is free.
The splendid, effective and superior TV3 viewer, however, paid attention to a much more important detail: that the series is bilingual. Even in a country like Catalonia (and in a city like Barcelona) where Catalan and Spanish are so hopelessly and constantly mixed, yesterday, during the series premiere, an army of viewers called it intolerable, annoying and even prosecutable that the protagonist used the language of Cervantes while she was... echando un polvo. That makes me think of two things: either, TV3 viewers only ever go to bed with people who are radical Catalan liberators, or they all still believe in the myth of linguistic normalization. Knowing the alarming tendency of Catalans to cultivate unrequited dogmas, I lean towards the second option.
Those ladies and gentlemen can, however, sleep peacefully. The fact that TV3 is broadcasting a bilingual series will not cause young people in the country to stop using Catalan. The reason is very simple: young people in the country do not watch TV3.
After spending decades broadcasting content for boomers created by boomers - even TV3 director general Vicent Sanchis says that - some do not understand why their children, the ones who read all seven Harry Potter books in Catalan and who had a subscription to Cavall Fort magazine, now prefer to watch Spanish high school series Élite instead of Catalan technology show No Pot Ser.
What these people may not know is that, although Drama premiered on TV3 last night, thousands of post-adolescents on planet Earth watched the six episodes of the series weeks ago. They watched them all because they felt challenged by them and because the series is good. So much so that they didn't mind having to go and find them on Playz, RTVE's digital channel for youth. Perhaps at the end of the day, the issue is not the language - whether Catalan, Spanish or Swahili - but the ability (or desire) to provide quality content to an audience that has not yet taken up the option of early retirement.