At the request of questions from the opposition in parliament, TVE has reported the cost of what will be the last season of ‘Cuéntame…’, of the last seven chapters that will close what has surely been the longest-running series in the history of TVE.
The price that the public corporation RTVE has paid or will pay to the production company Grupo Ganga is 762,913 euros per chapter, on average, that is, a total of 5.3 million euros in total, to which the corresponding VAT must be added. It is not the object of this column, at least today, to enter into the discussion of whether this production has been expensive, or cheap, or if it is within the usual economic parameters that are handled in the audiovisual market. What seems essential to me is to verify, highlight, how much it costs public television to submit to the obligatory transparency about the destination of the public money available to them.
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It is true that publicly owned chains must offer a transparency portal so that citizens can consult it. RTVE, and also TV-3 (CCMA), for example, offer it. But I assure you that these portals are so perversely made that they seem more like a labyrinthine obstacle course than transparency. These arborescent, convoluted and colossal monetary destinations that public television have should be offered to the public with a clarity that I miss and that I have been demanding for a long time. Allow me an anecdote that in the 70s and 80s there was a lot of whining. Some old classmates will surely remember her too. I am referring to the case of the grand piano that was in one of the RNE studios, at its headquarters on Passeig de Gràcia in Barcelona. The piano was hired on a rental basis, and it stayed that way for years and years, many, paying the rent with public money every month. It was calculated that with all that money, 20 new pianos could have been bought.
I have been demanding in this daily column, for 30 years – it will be three decades next May – that the public channels should insert at the end of each program, together with the credit titles, what costs us what we have just seen . The price we all pay for what they offer us. But there is no way. Explaining well, and in detail, the distribution of the pasta –the cake– makes them nervous. There must be a reason. ‘Ego sum vox clamantis in deserto’.