The transmission equipment and the broadcast tape of the night of the coup d’état of 23-F; the science fiction serial of the hero Diego Valor, transmitted between 1953 and 1958; the script of the last Hour 25 which was driven by the legendary Carlos Llamas, before his death in 2007; the facsimile of the composition of the Blue Symphony; and a auca ―kind of print/comic― from 1949 with several rhymes: “It will rain or it will not rain, the radio will tell it.” This is the cultural legacy that Cadena SER has deposited this Thursday morning, within the framework of its centenary, at site 1,182 of the Caja de las Letras of the Cervantes Institute. The space is an old vault from a century ago that stores in almost 1,800 boxes objects related to science, arts and letters, donated by famous figures of Hispanic culture.
“In this vault is the memory of Weekly reportfrom the EFE agency or from Iñaki Gabilondo. As well as the legacy of García Márquez or Miguel Delibes, who never separated journalistic training from culture,” said Luis García Montero at the event on Thursday morning. The event was a tribute to the Sociedad Española de Radiodimisión, which began in 1924 as Radio Barcelona, the first authorized radio station in Spain, which arrived in Madrid the following year and has been called Cadena SER since 1940. “A century ago, for the first time a person could know beyond their surroundings and it was not necessary to have high purchasing power or live in the big cities to access culture,” said Jaume Serra, director of the centenary celebrations and delegate of Prisa Media in Catalonia, while recalling how in those early years an agreement was signed to broadcast opera over the airwaves.
Along with Serra and García Montero, Montserrat Domínguez, SER content director, and Javier del Pino, program director, were present at the event. To live that is two days
After the ceremony, Domínguez and del Pino were joined in a round table by the host of the news program Day by dayÁngels Barceló, and that of Hour 25Aimar Bretos. They discussed the relationship between the public and the radio journalist, the transmission of culture through the microphone and the first experiences that led them to SER. All of this was always influenced by the figure of Carlos Llamas, a sharp and dedicated director who consolidated Hour 25 as one of the most influential radio programmes in Spanish society, and who, in addition to his last script at the helm of the news programme, a set of memories and writings recovered by Miguel Ángel Muñoz were deposited in the Caja de las Letras.
“He has sarcasm, movie quotes, skepticism, he is Carlos in his purest form. It allowed the listeners to think that any one of them was in charge of Hour 25″, Del Pinar said about his colleague, who died in 2007 at the age of 53 from esophageal cancer. Months ago he warned his audience of his illness and returned for one last installment. The archive of his memories rescues the messages from an audience forum when it was known that he was going to return: “It is not edited and does not have a single hater”.
“All of us who have been through Hour 25, somehow we know that we are driving Llamas’ car. It is his imprint,” Bretos contributed. Montserrat Domínguez added that to attract new audiences, a “radio personality” like Llamas’s is necessary with “her own language, optics, different angles to approach the news, forms of expression.” Barceló was not left out of the praise and recalled when he had to take charge of the program after his death: “For me it was terror because I was going to replace someone with an unquestionable personality.”
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