José María Carrascal (El Vellón, Madrid, 1930) has died at the age of 93, saying goodbye to sixty-five continuous years of journalism. He carried out his passion to the end: last Tuesday he published his last column in the newspaper ABC. The arrival of private television in Spain in 1990 made him famous: he presented the midnight news program on Antena 3 and soon became a television icon. His neck-breaking ties, his dislocated diction, and his vitriolic criticism of Felipe González’s government brought him immense popularity. He also contributed his phrasing to the headlines of foreign newspapers, which earned him much imitation by comedians.
His news was author’s: he accompanied the news with his editorial opinion, sometimes half sitting on the corner of his table. “If a man has reached fifty years of age and does not say what he thinks, he has failed in life,” he responded to me a few months after his debut, when I asked him if he did not feel afraid for attacking the socialist government of Spain so virulently. at that time all-powerful due to its absolute majority in Congress.
José María Carrascal had just turned 60 and we Spanish viewers were not used to either senior informants or such caustic comments. “You will end up in jail,” he told me that some followers, still sensitive to the memory of Franco’s repression, warned him. But Carrascal was not afraid: he came from the United States, where he had been working as a journalist for thirty years, and where he had learned bellicose journalism as a counterpower. Carrascal inaugurated in Spain a style later adopted by other radio and television companies.
José María Carrascal’s first vocation, for which he trained in Barcelona, was that of a sailor: “It was the only way to get out of a closed Spain and see the world,” he confessed to me. He left Spain in 1957 and did not return until 1990. He ended up abandoning seamanship because of the little time it left him for his true vocation: writing! He lived for a time in Germany and moved to the United States. He wrote all genres of journalism, and also novels. A novel of his, Goovie, inspired by American hippies, won the Nadal Prize (1972), and the City of Barcelona Prize (1973). In his lifetime he would publish twenty books, including fiction and essays.
After thirty-three years outside Spain, he hesitated about accepting the offer from Antena 3. He consulted the singer Julio Iglesias, a friend of his, who advised him: “Our compatriots are very bastards and they will play tricks on you, but you will have a great time!” ! Accept and go, without selling your New York apartment.” Carrascal listened to him and never regretted it, despite his opinion that “Spain is a country full of hell,” as he declared to me in 1991. Carrascal continued spending the summer in his apartment in New York with his wife Ellen, born in Germany. They had no children and were very happy.
José María Carrascal retired from television – after a last foray with Xavier Sardà in the program We are all human – but he has not stopped publishing books and articles in the press over the last twenty years. Carrascal has been a sharp and fine journalist, with a liberal-conservative pen, a conversational, affable and transparent personality, a friendly, educated and good man who fondly met us “at the stroke of midnight” the next day, and now our appointment is already eternal.