Spain’s Stunning 1968 Eurovision Win Revisited in ‘La Canción,’ From ‘Hierro,’ ‘Rapa’s’ Pepe Coira and Fran Araujo    

From the 1950s, as foreign tourists poured onto its beaches, Spain lobbied hard to join the European Economic Community, presenting itself as a modern country, despite its rule by an arcane 1930s dictator. By 1968, targeted reform notwithstanding, the only part of Europe Spain had entered was the Eurovision Song Contest, and it hadn’t even won that either.

Based often exactly on historical facts and real-life figures, “La Canción,” a Movistar Plus+, Buendía Estudios three-part miniseries world premieres at this week’s Malaga Film Festival, distributed outside Spain by Movistar Plus+ Internacional. 

It begins with ageing dictator Francisco Franco entrusting minister Manuel Fraga with the task of winning the Eurovision Song Contest, which Fraga delegates to Spanish pubcaster TVE.

Incredibly for some, they succeed, Massiel, a flamboyant pro-Fidel Castro Spanish singer who has no time for Franco, delivers a powerful performance of “La la la,” beating Cliff Richard’s frontrunner “Congratulations” by just one point.

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Directed by Alejandro Marín (“Love & Revolution”), breezy, fast-paced, retro and sluiced with soundtrack of songs of the period, “La Canción” tells the story, in a fiction series which takes in the main events: the enrolment of real life Artur Caps (Alex Brendemühl), an Austrian emigré but king of TVE’s variety shows, to choose the song; the choice of Joan Manuel Serrat (Marcel Borràs), an icon of Catalan dissidence so symbol of Spanish modernity, to sing it; when Serrat pulls out, denied the right to sing “La, la, la” in Catalan, the desperate recourse to firebrand Massiel (Carolina Yuste), who, despite little time to rehearse, pulls of a great performance at London’s Albert Hall. 

Caps’ wingman is the series’ protagonist Esteban (Patrick Criado), pig ignorant about music but driven by the initial dogged ambition of scaling posts in Franco’s government.

Produced by Susana Herreras for Movistar Plus+ and Ignacio Morales for Buendía Estudios, this, however, is a series from Pepe Coira and Fran Araújo, the creator and co-writer of “Hierro,” and creators and writers of “Rapa,” two of the most watched series in Movistar Plus+’s history. 

In both “Hierro” and “Rapa,” they took a genre, the rural crime mystery, and tore up the rule book, as Araújo once put it, identifying the murderer half way through “Hierro” Season 1 and even earlier in “Rapa” Season 1, and creating endearing characters sparking an audience investment which is the biggest  driver of the series’ broad audiences.  

La Canción

With “La Canción,” a highly entertaining drama which is often comic – some events which took place were simply comic, explains Araújo –  the duo bring much more to the table, as they explained in an interview in the run-up to the series Malaga world premiere:   

“La Canción” has something of the Spanish cinema of ‘the 60s, its breezy light tone and of course period aesthetic. But it’s much more, however, a reflection, for example, on historic process. In explaining how Spain came to win the Eurovision Song Contest, you stress the role of chance, accident…

Pepe Coira: We didn’t aim to reproduce a ‘60s Spanish comedy or have them in mind as a reference. We were very interested in the era, however, and its aesthetics are one of the bases of the series though not the reason for making it. Also, though not defining the series as a comedy, we thought it should be loaded with comedy because it’s loaded with real events. We’re talking, moreover, about an episode which has large contradictions, very strange things, and we wanted this mix to talk about Spain without being overly solemn, a series with a certain lightness, but which also has everything behind that without forgetting what country we were in and its circumstances. 

The series also talks about the basic challenge of Spain in 1968: How could it really modernize while retaining an arcane 1930s dictator in power. It attempted to sell the idea of a European-style state backing the New Spanish Cinema or sending the Novo Canço’s Joan Manuel Serrat to London as its Eurovision candidate. What happens with Serrat shows up, however, the limits of Spain’s reform….

Fran Araújo: Yes, our intention is to show the ‘60s as they really were. The Spanish cinema of Marisol sold a false reality of happiness, with nothing dark. The series’ characters are part of the era – the protagonist begins trying to scale Franco’s bureaucracy – but ‘60s cinema didn’t say how that bureaucracy worked, police crackdowns on university protests…The series talks about this moment when we’re on the cusp of freedom, but we weren’t free and it was difficult to know what stage the political system had reached.

This cusp of freedom is sensed in a lovely scene between Massiel and Esteban’s girlfriend Lucía in a park in Paris where Lucía explains that people – her parents, Esteban, Franco – expects her to be a pharmacist, but it’s so boring, she says. And Massiel advises her to take control of her life, be what she wants to be. Here, I sense, you’re talking about the impact of dictatorship on ordinary people’s lives where, for example, Esteban merely reacts to circumstance….

Araújo: This is exactly what we wanted to talk about. There’s another scene between Massiel and Esteban and Lucía where Massiel says, “I know we’re living in a difficult moment but don’t be deceived, they don’t control your life, it’s just not true.” At that moment, most people thought that they still did, but thought they should begin to think that maybe it’s not true….  

Coira: We thought this was a great chance  to talk about this, without giving history lessons in a series with a lot of pace. But I think this was the reason why we created this series, to mix these historical and social issues in a slightly absurd tale. And another aspect is the world of television in Spain, this mixture of the sublime and prosaic. 

Araújo: Control of TVE, Spain’s public broadcast network, was split 50%/50% between Falangists and Opus Dei technocrats, which was exactly the same with the government. It was a kind of microcosmos which defined how the political system worked.    

And is the series finished? 

Araújo: No. We are finishing the post-production process. We are transferring the digital image to 16mm. It’s the first time this will be done in Spain that we know.

You’re one of the most popular creatives duos in Spain, making “Hierro” and “Rapa,” two of the most-watched series in Movistar Plus+ history. How do you work on series?

Coira: Quite informally. “La Canción” was born when we were turning over ideas for a series and we said, ‘There’s a story here,’ and it wouldn’t be a crime drama which is very much in our comfort zone, though it allows a huge range of things. “La Canción,” when push comes to shove however, is not so different to “Hierro” and “Rapa”: It’s trying to tell a story, treating viewers with large respect and trying to be entertaining. 

Araújo: Our obsession when writing is to write from the point of view of the characters. Everything can have humor, emotion, life, without avoiding genre. But what we do is construct complex characters  with whom we hope that spectators will want to make a journey with them, spending number of hours with these human beings.