I watch my colleague Xavier Graset’s program many nights (Més 324, from Monday to Friday, channel 324 and TV3) for the pleasure of confirming that there are always more pro-independence talk shows than autonomists (making fun of the Catalan electorate) and because talks about books with their authors (in the absence of an entire hour on books on Catalan public television).
But on Monday night, everything came to a head in Graset’s interview with the author of the book Réquiem català . And if a nation parading on a red carpet, the Catalan-speaking and Catalan actress and poet Juana Dolores (el Prat de Llobregat, 1992). The artist burst out. A Vesuvian eruption! An outbreak that makes history. I screenshotted it and tweeted it, at a loss for words: what I was seeing was too new to caption. I evoked “millennialism will come!” of Ar rabal (about Dragon) and “I’ve come to talk about my book!” of Umbral (in that of Milá). Another gritty and unpredictable gem of television, true television.
“Let’s see if the director and the board of old people at TV3 resigns and we do a little better if young people come in,” said Juana Dolores, an ageist, to Graset (“how much do you get paid, 3,000 euros?”, she asked him): that is, television is still of interest to informed young people who understand that it remains powerful. That’s why Juana Dolores accused TV3 of “validating Junts and the fucking old man from Trias” (insolent ageism): “I hope a meteor falls on him!” (metaphor), he wished, reprimanding Iolanda Batallé (a conspicuous socialite who “certainly earns more than 3,000 euros”) for his defense of Trias. Juana Dolores sent another meteorite to “la libreria Ona” (it only sells books in Catalan and orchestrates sovereignist events, with the usual presence of Jordi Pujol) to “break everything”. He satirized in passing “those from the CUP, hippies who do Gestalt and those things”.
“I don’t know how you don’t tell your panelists to talk (do you choose them or do they impose on you?), TV3 journalists don’t do your job”, the artist criticized Xavier Graset (“what ineptitude”, “everyone you’re right-wing”, “what a shame”) and claimed “Marxist” and “class” analyzes (here it got old). It was an ideological and critical spectacle without respite, devastating: “It is necessary to dismantle the institutional Catalanity orchestrated by the ruling classes of this country, Catalanity is multiple, it is in the streets”, he retorted in defense of a “red and pink Catalonia , popular and feminine” (with charm and glamour, then).
Juana Dolores (“I’ve come to shit on everything!”) made me see that TV3 already needs (!) a space for debate that compares ideas beyond today’s blissful uniformity. The artist repeated that TV3 is “the public television of my country” and interpreted a burst of -suicidal?- freedom: this Catalan – like thousands – does not want to close TV3 (or to be seen as an “integrated ) but to open its (!) public television to the boiling plurality of the streets and neighborhoods, to non-independence views, to daring impure and liminal ideas and to all the Vesuvian shoots of freedom: a very healthy and very holy ambition! – @amelanovela
