You will have heard on more than one occasion that every time ‘Pretty Woman’ is broadcast on television, audiences skyrocket. Nowadays it is no longer so true: Telecinco broadcast it a couple of days ago and the result was not spectacular. In any case, not even the film by Richard Gere and Julia Roberts has come to live up to what is the greatest milestone in television cinema: the most viewed film in history in Spain has nothing Hollywood about it.
The cateet that is cateet. On January 14, 1992 (that is, with the private ones already at full capacity, but still unable to stand up to depending on the customs of the Spanish viewer), the broadcast on La 1 of ‘Cateto a port’ had an average audience of 10,078,000 viewers and a stratospheric share 60.5% (for comparison, the final of the last Copa del Rey, the most watched in years, did not reach 50%, and it is rare for a daily program to exceed 15%).
Tremendous landism. ‘Cateto a port’ is a 1970 Spanish comedy starring Alfredo Landa. In it, a simple young man, after multiple attempts to avoid military service in order to take care of his little brother, ends up joining the Navy, having to face multiple difficulties due to his lack of experience. The film uses simple humor for all audiences, contrasting the naive protagonist (the recruit Cañete, whose name will soon become iconic) and the highly regulated environment of the Navy. All seasoned, of course, with its mild military propaganda, showing the modernity and friendliness of the institutions.
Why do you like ‘Cateto a port’? His conciliatory tone, so typical of the last years of the Franco dictatorship, guaranteed him notable box office success, and above all, as with other stars of the time such as Paco Martínez Soria, the favor of the public. Its comedy of manners with a very friendly tone makes ‘Cateto a port’ very digestible by audiences of all ages, just what brought ten million people to the television screen. The most aggressive landismo was yet to come, full of plots with Spanish boys chasing Swedish women among images of medium intensity eroticism. It would be inaugurated, precisely, that same 1970 with a film by the same director, ‘You will not desire the neighbor on the fifth floor’.
Relative milestone. Of course, we are talking about an absolute record… since there have been measurements, something that started in Spain in 1986. In 1992, audiences had already atomized due to private ones, so it is possible to think that in the seventies and eighties, when the population’s primary entertainment was television, the audiences for other films (or even this one) could have been much larger. Before measurement with audiometers, the audience was measured through the General Media Study (EGM) since 1968, which used interviews to estimate consumption.
Other successes. There are only four feature films registered that have exceeded 9 million on average: the humorous western by Clint Eastwood and Shirley McLaine ‘Two Mules and a Woman’, with 9,598,000; the tremendous ‘The Priest’s Son’ by Fernando Esteso, with 9,287,000 spectators; We were talking about ‘Pretty Woman’ and there it is, with 9,223,000 viewers; and finally, ‘Dirty Dancing’ with 9,110,000 viewers. Be careful, because they are all broadcasts from 1992 (with the exception of ‘Pretty Woman’, from 1994), which suggests that, despite the arrival of private broadcasts, there was a general increase in people watching television in the early nineties.
