TELEVISION IN SPAIN

Press, Volume XCVII, Issue 28530, 8 March 1958, Page 10

TELEVISION IN SPAIN

Mountain Station Planned (By a Reuter Correspondent) MADRID. One of the highest television transmitting stations in the world is being built among the snows on a peak of the Guadarrama Mountains. 36 miles from Madrid. Work is frequently interrupted by icy blizzards, which sweep across the 320 feet high television tower now being installed on top of the 7400 feet high peak known as the Bola del Mundo (the Globe of the World). With this powerful transmitter, situated high above the winter sports resort of Navacerrada, the Spanish Government hopes to. make great use of television in its battle to improve the level of national education and to end the illiteracy which still affects nearly one person in five of the population (17 per cent, according to the last figures). The huge mast of this new station has to be built to resist gusts of wind of up to 72 miles an hour. But when it is in operation, it will be able to send out programmes which will be seen far over the upland plateau of New and .Old Castile, in the capital, Madrid, and such historic, medieval towns as Toledo, Salamanca, Burgos, and others. These programmes will reach, with violent impact, into hundreds of isolated hill villages of the two Castiles, where oxcarts still rumble over the cobbled streets and where farming methods have changed little since the days of the Roman Empire. Although this is one of_ the nations in Europe where teleTOion sets are most expensive—they cost from £lOO to £2lo—there is tremendous enthusiasm for television. When the small Madrid station opened on October 28, 1956, there were only 600 receiver sets in and around the capital. Today, 10.800 sets are licensed and viewers are estimated at between 80,000 and 100,000. Cafes and bars which install a television set are sure of being well patronised. Double Shifts Six Spanish industrial plants are working double shifts to turn out new television sets, and the Government has asked manufacturers to make an “austerity set” at the, for Spain, modest price of £B5 sterling to* enable a bigger public to see the programmes. When it comes into operation this summer, the new mountain station will send out “standard programmes” to stations in various parts of Spain Land lines will take the programme to industrial Barcelona. down to the orange groves of Valencia, up to the northcentral and fast-growing city of Saragosa, and west To the famous pilgrimage centre of Santiago de Compostela. The first of these subsidiary or booster stations to come into operation will be Barcelona, which is scheduled to open during the summer. Each station •will insert a regional flavour in the basic programme received from the new Bola del Mundo station. Although the new television station belongs to the State, its programme will include commercial advertising. The service will be extended • considerably compared with the present restricted programmes put out by Spain’s only existing television the local one in Madrid, whicn is on the air for only three hours from 9.30 p.m. to 00.30 a.m. each day. These late hours are chosen in keeping with'the Spanish prediliction for doing things at times somewhat out of step with their European neighbours. Although Spanish economists are constantly emphasising that to have dinner at 10 p.m. is unsuitable for persons who have to be at work reasonably early next day and doctors add their diagnosis that these late and heavy meals benefit only the manufacturers of bicarbonate of soda, Spain continues to enjoy staying up when her neighbours are in bed. Popular Items Plays, football matches, and bullfights are the most popular items on the present television programmes. which suffer much from padding with out-of-date films. But, thanks to the income from advertising and the present limited programme schedule, television for Madrid is so far costing the Spanish State only about £17,000 a year, though expenditure is, of course, increasing as new stations are built. Some protests have been voiced by mountain-lovers that the new television tower may z spoil the superb scenery of the Guadarrama Sierra—just as protests were made against the construction several years ago of an eight-storey hostel built by the labour unions in the winter sports centre of Navacerrada, just below the new station. But most Spaniards are more interested in television than in the scenery of the Guadarrama mountains.