“Hello, hello!” Pepe Domingo Castaño (80) greeted loudly and the corners of the radio lit up. “The one with the goals, the one with the emotion, the one with the spectacle…!” Millions of listeners mourn today the man who has filled their hearts – Sports carousel in Ser, Playtime in Cope – with infinite hours of joy, games, football, sports “and fun, and I will do it until I run out of energy.” words,” Pepe Domingo Castaño told me a year and a half ago. He was active in life as a party and radiated it like no one else, jovial and enthusiastic. Pepe Domingo Castaño elevated radio advertising to a joyous spectacle: he was an artist, he was a radio genius.
“I am the radio man!” he declared, very active and with almost six decades of experience in the microphone. His radio talent was natural, having worked as a teenager at parties in his hometown (Lestrove, A Coruña, 1942), where he served as master of ceremonies: “They called me Pepe Fiestas!” He laughed. He debuted on Radio Galicia and soon triumphed on Radio Madrid, with an Ondas (1975) for El Gran musical: he played records, hosted galas, interviewed… And he made friends with another talented Galician: Julio Iglesias, whom he helped compose the lyrics from A song to Galicia, today an anthem for Galicians.
His unmatched voice, a party in itself, raucous and fair, adorned an enormous narrative talent, a multifaceted capacity to tell anything. That is why she earned other Ondas awards in 1996, 2002 and 2006, with Carrusel Deportivo, on Ser, where she made art with advertisements during sports broadcasts. “A little cigar!” He cried out vibrantly and in chorus, an expression that is already a classic on the airwaves. In 2010, his boss, sports journalist Paco González, was fired, and Pepe Domingo Castaño – who adored him like a son or brother – left the station with him and dragged fifty journalists from Ser to La Ser. Cope. Pepe Domingo Castaño’s first speech in Tiempo de Juego (Cope booth, August 27, 2010) is a lesson in radio journalism: the masterful video is on YouTube.
Few remember that a 25-year-old Pepe Domingo Castaño co-presented Biblioteca Joven on TVE in 1967 with María Luisa Seco (a legend for the children who watched TV in the 60s), whom he would marry… “but it didn’t work out.” “, he summed me up when commenting on his memorial book Hasta que se me cún las Palabras (Aguilar). Castaño would meet Tere in 1976 (“my eternal girlfriend,” he described her) and they had two children. Castaño had debuted his ability to love with his mother, of whom he spoke with immense tenderness: unable to raise their twelve children, his parents placed little Pepe in a convent so that he could be ordained as a friar and have something to eat. “But I dropped out, how upset my parents were!” The magnet of life, of emotion, of spectacle could do him, I understood in his words from a year and a half ago: “Enjoy everything you do, life will reward you! You live with enthusiasm, with an ounce of madness and happy friends: revelry is part of the life of a healthy person.” How well spoken, teacher, what a lesson, it is foolish not to pay attention to you.
