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The original was posted on /r/hobbydrama by /u/Sentient_Flesh on 2025-09-16 11:28:35+00:00.

TN: All links below lead to sources in Spanish. All relevant excerpts have been translated by yours truly.

Disclaimer: Because real life sucks, this drama tangentially involves politics. Most direct references to it (such as parties or political figures tangentially involved) have been left mostly left out for the sake of everyone’s sanity, but due to their involvement, political leanings and so on had to be mentioned. Some of the content linked below is NSFW, reader’s discretion is advised and all that.

TW: Cyberbullying, fatphobia.

Ah, the change to a new year, that wonderful time when we’re all reminded that we’re one step closer to our collective doom, whichever it may be; a time of celebration, joy, a lot of alcohol and of course traditions. As you may know, dear reader, people around the world have ways of marking the time you put a new calendar on the wall that don’t just consist of getting blackout drunk while looking at all those pretty explosions in the sky:

In Japan they have a whole festival around it, with visits to Shinto shrines and eating specific foods, in many places of Latin-America, but specially in Brazil, people dress up in while, and in much of Western Europe, millions tune in during the morning of the New Year to listen to a happy tune about the Austrian Empire winning a battle against a kingdom that no longer exists, you know, European things; and in Spain specifically, we eat grapes. You might have seen it in every list of weird things people do in New Years around the world, and despite how the normal given research for those content farms tend to be, this one is true. We eat grapes, the whole family (or friends) together, one for every chime of the clock at midnight, or until granny starts choking.

So, of course, when it comes to television, it is also a major event, with pretty much the entire day and several of the previous ones dedicated entirely to it. There are documentaries about what happened in the year, long-form skit shows, interviews to people who are doing rehearsals for the big moment (as you may imagine, some can find the whole eating grapes fast hard and need to practice, no, seriously.) There’s even a show called “Cachitos de Hierro y Cromo” (Bits of Iron and Chrome) that just consists of archival footage of musical acts from decades ago interpersed with subtitles that make fun of major political events of the year. That one’s very popular, by the way. And there’s massive amounts of hype about who will get the big thing. The crowning jewel of the night, the golden minute at midnight.

And that’s partly because when I say that it is “one for every chime of the clock” I don’t mean whatever random clock the family has at home, or whichever is in the venue in which a large group of friends is partying, no, I mean the clock, singular. The Clock. This clock.

The clock on top of the tower at the (former) Royal Posthouse of Madrid, right in the geographical center point of the entire country.

Now, before you, dear reader, have any second thoughts about how that can be so important, let me put forth that the Chimes special is the most watched show of the year. Whoever gets the highest audience can, easily, have a third of the entire viewership at the time and (according to the audience numbers, which are a rabbit hole that I’m not going to go into) about 10% of the entire population of the country watching. Millions and millions of people. And right in that moment, there’s airspace for ads. Which means that there are ridiculously high amounts of money to be made for whichever network manages to be the chosen one, the great champion of the night. So, of course, it’s a big competition.

And in 2024, just last year, it was an all out war.

But, before we go into that, let’s go three decades and a half back in time.

It’s the turn of the 90s, and following a debate that lasted a whole decade full of social changes and conflict in Spain, the cabinet of prime minister Felipe González put on law that allowed for the creation of private television channels, partially based on the Italian model of the time. Of the three new channels that were granted emission rights at the time, only two survived the passage of time: Telecinco and Antena 3.

Telecinco is a massive clusterfuck that someone should write an entire writeup about here some day, but the one that matters for this drama is the latter.

Antena 3 was once a sort of golden standard in Spain of what a private television network was supposed to be. Specially when compared to the other one… I’m sorry, I know that I said literally less than a senntence ago that I wasn’t going to go into any T5 stuff but just to give you an idea of how low the bar was, it was ultimately owned by Silvio Berlusconi. If you know anything about European politics, I’m sure a cold shudder just went down your spine. So yeah, Antena 3 had everything, not that the other one competed much in that, from having the latest films to come out of Hollywood (all three years later, but they had it the earliest), to shows with high audiences, big serious news and even popular game shows.

The only thing they didn’t have was the highest audience. Because despite our talk about private television channels and their networks, we’ve kind of left out the big, massive and old elephant in the room out. Our other faction in the brewing conflict. So, without any more delay, on the opposing corner of the square:

Introducing the Corporation of Spanish Radio and Television.

Since the very arrival of television as a medium in the 1950s, RadioTeleVisión Española, or RTVE, or TVE for short (That’s the one I’ll be using here) has been the central behemoth that all the later networks tried to defeat. Until the arrival of private television, it was the defining cultural force of generations. It had everything the other networks had and even more, ranging from goth communism-soaked puppetry for children to wacky game shows that the others couldn’t risk their audience in. Yes, that’s a real game show, and yes, that’s an actual bull.

Keep that last one in mind, this isn’t a random display of weirdness to keep this writeup quirky, oh no, that’s going to be important down the line.

So, of course, since a market has been installed, all of the private companies tried to compete against the big public Goliath in attempts to grab the attention of the general public, be either making game shows that the more public-morale-minded broadcaster wouldn’t approve of, buying large amounts of foreign shows with the backing of industry connections and the shareholders , starting what eventually would be known as Telebasura, or TVTrash (which is an entire topic for a writeup on its own) or doing more underhaned schemes, like heavily lobbying the government into changing its method of financing so it couldn’t run ads anymore (except for extremely limited times like in the New Year’s Eve Special) and, presumably, become a financial failure while the rest racked in the collateral profits. Usual heroic underdog stuff, as you can see.

But, back on topic, historically, since there’s a competition, they won the battle for the Chimes on a score of 30 out of 33. Having only fallen for the first time in 2021, then 2022, and of course, 2023. Which as you may imagine, is rather impressive and as much a source of pride for the public broadcaster as it became almost a cliché; the image of many Spaniards nowadays of what the special looks like consists of TV host Ramón García (wearing a traditional Castillian cloak) alongside actress and TV host Anne Igartiburu, despite the fact that they have only done so together six times, and one of them wasn’t even in TVE but in Twitch, of all places. But I disgress.

So you might be asking, should any of this historical background on something so trivial not have bored you (if it has, you might be in the wrong subreddit, look it up), what happened to make TVE fail for those three years? Well, it could be a mix of many factors: People who regularily watch television in Spain (that is, those over the age of 40) tend to be rather set in their ways and it had finally come a generational change in which those who preferred Antena 3 (which was the winner of those years) , it may be because of distortions caused by the younger populations no longer watching nearly as much television as their parents and grandparents, or it could even have a political factor since there has been significant amounts of propaganda about how the Sánchez administration has taken over TVE and is using it for ideological propaganda, causing viewers to shift to the significantly more conservative A3. All of it seems plausible when one looks at the audience shifts (there’s nerds of that, by the way, I found about it last year, talk about a niche topic) it seems to be all three.

Or it could be the dress. Let’s talk about the dress.

Search of the Fairy Tail fanservice sound effect. I’m not going to link that.

Cristina Pedroche is a comedian… No, scratch that. Cristina Pedroche is a woman who television executives, and herself, thinks is funny. You know the type. She is also, by all western beauty standards, objective…

Content cut off. Read original on https://old.reddit.com/r/HobbyDrama/comments/1nietkd/spanish_television_the_great_new_years_eve/