Watching TV
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Yet after more than two decades in Spain, I find I have never really connected with Spanish television. It is not simply a matter of language or cultural barriers. It comes down to the nature of the programmes themselves, and the bizarre logic of how they are scheduled.
British television has always had a substantial appetite for neatly packaged fiction. The schedules are built like clockwork: 30-minute sitcoms, hour-long crime serials, hospital dramas and soap operas with predictable start and finish times. From Happy Valley and Line of Duty to Coronation Street, British evening TV traditionally offers a succession of distinct programmes, each with its own clear identity. When a drama finishes at 10 pm, the news begins. Whether you carry on watching, switch channels or go to bed, you know where you stand. You are not held hostage to an unknown timetable or unending adverts.
Spanish broadcast television works on an entirely different rhythm. On the principal channels, outside the daily afternoon period soaps or imported Latin American telenovelas, there seems to be little appetite for the compact, weekly episodic drama or the classic sitcom. That has not always been the case, but it is certainly the impression given by today’s schedules.
Where British prime time peaks between 8 pm and 10 pm, Spanish prime time barely gets going before 10.30 pm. What follows is rarely a structured play or a tightly written series. It is usually a sprawling, studio-based marathon in which guests are interviewed, put on the spot or made to perform absurd tasks — flying drones or slicing vegetables against the clock — while the host drags the format out long into the night. It is not programming designed for focused watching; it is background noise for loading the dishwasher, putting the kids to bed or folding laundry.
This structural difference extends directly into celebrity culture. British television operates a self-perpetuating fame machine. Someone might have won a Paralympic gold in a niche sport, had a briefly successful boxing career or played guitar in a forgotten band thirty years ago. In real-world terms, they may be barely public figures. But put them on I’m a Celebrity… Get Me Out of Here!, watch them eat kangaroo testicles with aplomb, or let them reach the semi-finals of Strictly Come Dancing, and a transformation occurs.
Their performance on that single flagship show secures their future as a recurring media presence. From that moment on, they are certified “celebrities”, recycled across the schedules: appearing on Celebrity Pointless, taking a seat on Celebrity MasterMind, popping up on The Traitors and offering opinions on panel shows. You may never have watched them box or swim, but because the British format machine keeps putting them on screen, their celebrity status becomes an unquestioned fact.
Spain does the celebrity thing too, but through raw, unvarnished spectacle. For years, daytime and late-night schedules were dominated by long-running studio shouting matches such as Sálvame, where women showing the terrible scarring of plastic surgery and overweight men in loud clothing competed to be heard over the general din as they dissected a minor celebrity’s marriage, tax troubles or wayward son's drug habit.
Even when Spain imports hit international formats, it stretches them until they snap. MasterChef UK is a tightly structured, scheduled test of culinary skill. MasterChef España is a three-hour late-night soap opera in which cooking is almost incidental. The judges play theatrical villains, the contestants tearfully discuss their personal lives, and culinary technique takes a back seat to high-tension emotional drama.
So why drag every format out to three hours? Part of the answer lies in the economics of television advertising and part in the idea of market share.
In Spain, success is heavily measured by audience share (cuota de pantalla) — the proportion of people watching television at a given moment who are tuned to a particular channel. Broadcasters want to keep viewers watching for as long as possible, and a programme that holds its audience late into the night can be more valuable than one that finishes at a sensible hour. For commercial channels, the longer the programme, the more opportunities there are to sell advertising, while keeping viewers watching also reduces the risk of their switching to a rival. Public broadcasters such as RTVE do not carry advertising, but audience share still matters: it helps demonstrate that they are reaching the public and provides an argument for continued funding.
It is a strategy that can leave you feeling trapped. Do you give up on a film with five minutes to go, or do you stand in your pyjamas, toothbrush in hand, waiting through a 25-minute ad break just to get to the end?
After all these years, I still feel as though I am missing out on some subtle piece of Spanish life by switching the television off. Or perhaps I have simply learned the first rule of Spanish TV: never wait for the ending, because you may be waiting a very long time
LATE NEWS: Pedro Sánchez, the President of the Government, appeared on David Broncano’s show, La Revuelta, last night. La Revuelta is one of the main contenders in Spain’s television ratings war. I thought I’d watch the programme on RTVE Play, the Spanish public broadcaster’s catch up service this morning. I was shocked. The interview lasts more than 100 minutes! This morning’s news was full of reports that it had been the most-watched programme of the day, with an average audience share of 33.9% and 4,387,000 viewers.
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