If you don't know Spain you probably won't have heard of
Cuéntame Cómo Pasó, the long-running show on TVE1 (basically the equivalent of BBC1) which tracks the lives of a fictional Madrid family over time, depicting events, at any given moment, roughly thirty years n the past.
I've not often seen it but it's been quite an important show in its time, not just because it's long-running and has a sizeable audience, but because the very idea on which it's based, the depiction of the recent past, runs contrary to the practice of forgetting, or to put it another way, denying, what happened in Spain prior to the death of Franco (and the "Transition" to democracy which followed). I say "practice", but it's more than that: it's enshrined in Spanish
law that human rights violations prior to the Transition may not be the subject of prosecution, and although it is not at all illegal to
discuss the past there have been some very strong
taboos against doing so, much stronger when the series began than they are now.
That's perhaps a bit heavier an introduction than the programme merits: it's much more a soap opera rather than a political drama, and its reference to events past can be more a way of providing period colour than of making a point. But I mention it just to give some idea of the show's importance in Spanish cultural life, and of explaining the fact that last Thursday's episode, ¡Maldito amor! (
"God-damned love!" for want of a better translation) was
advertised with the surprising heading:
Kárpov y Kaspárov, en 'Cuéntame': Cuando el ajedrez arrasaba en los 80
or as we might say:
the Eighties, when it was chess that ruled.
Those were the days.
