With the revetlla of Sant Joan as a common thread, the Sálvame program said goodbye to the Telecinco television network yesterday. “This will not be a funeral, it will be a party”, this was the spirit that the collaborators wanted to convey to the audience from the beginning of their last chapter.
All dressed in white for the occasion, the program’s team gathered on the set, decorated with celebratory motifs, for the end of its broadcast after 14 years on air.
During the afternoon, the well-known faces of the program brought different objects and documents such as tapes and photographs from Sálvame’s secret archives to a large bonfire located outside the set. This sensitive material about some celebrities from the national scene, as they assured , will never see the light again after burning in the great pyre.
The program said goodbye after 3,639 episodes and the person in charge of lighting the symbolic bonfire was the Spanish archer Antonio Rebollo, who also lit the peveter of the 1992 Barcelona Olympic Games.
At the beginning of the program, a few collaborators traveled to various points in Madrid and Toledo to portray what Sálvame has meant to its audience and also to highlight how relevant, for better or worse, the program for the history of television.
Belén Esteban moved to a nursing home; Kiko Matamoros did the same to Lydia Lozano’s mother’s house to ask for her forgiveness; Lozano went to the town of Pantoja, a surname that has starred in hours and hours of the program; Alonso Caparrós visited a young woman who was born on the same day and at the same time as the program 14 years ago; and Pipi Estrada approached a clinic where the first baby was scheduled to be born after the end of the broadcast.
Kiko Hernández, Terelu Campos, Adela González, María Patiño, Carmen Borrego, Rafa Mora, Antonio Montero, Miguel Frigenti, Gema López, Laura, Chelo García Cortés, Carmen Alcaide, Pilar Vidal, and José Antonio Avilés, none wanted to miss the farewell to Sálvame under the direction of David Valldeperas, another well-known face of the program despite being behind the cameras.
The most notable absence of the afternoon was that of its star presenter, Jorge Javier Vázquez, on medical leave. Despite not being present, the program did not forget him and the entire set gave him a standing ovation to thank him for the years dedicated to television.
Videos of the best moments, thanks, tears, connections with viewers from all over the world and, as it could not be otherwise, there was also time to point out prominent ex-collaborators who repudiate Sálvame and who did not want to participate in the ‘last program for different past disputes.
June 23 will be a marked date for the stalwarts of the program, since its last broadcast coincided with another sad event, the death of one of its indisputable protagonists over the years, Mila Ximénez, who died on same day in 2021.
