‘Journey to the center of television’ celebrates its ten years diving through the RTVE archive

2023-06-01 00:55:58

The journalist Pedro Santos is against the clock preparing the thirteenth season of ‘Viaje al centro de tele’, the program that reviews the RTVE archive with a good dose of humor and a familiar and friendly tone, which premieres this Thursday at 10 p.m. :40 hours on La 1. Some new chapters that will be special to coincide with the tenth anniversary of his birth, whose origin arose in the summer of 2013, as a filler program for the ‘late night’ slot and that, a decade later , has become one of the most competitive spaces in the public chain. Because currently few formats can boast of their longevity over time, at a time when generalist television is constantly changing in the search for new content to attract viewers.

«The evolution has been surprising because we thought it was a program for the summer. I remember that in the second season we believed that we were not going to have themes to make more chapters and in the end we have taken a run until we were ten years old, “says the director of ‘Journey to the center of television’, who also values ​​fidelity of a space that “endures what is thrown at it, resists its broadcast at any time of the day and always complies”. The new installments of the format will compete directly with ‘Survivientes’, the great ‘reality’ show on Telecinco.

In this decade, ‘Viaje…’ has changed, but has maintained its essence with the unmistakable voice of filmmaker Santiago Segura. «We have modified the language, now we are whiter. We continue to make humor but for all audiences », he reveals. The La 1 program has the merit of being the nostalgia space on RTVE that has lasted the longest, as well as being the only one that has resisted the challenge of the competition, which has tried to copy the formula with less success. «The fundamental secret is that we have an archive that no other television has. We have more resources than the others”, says Santos, who also highlights the rhythm and the need to keep updating with the characters of the moment, “who also have a past” on the small screen.

The journalist remembers the first time he presented the project to the management of TVE. That caused astonishment, according to his account, for radically changing the way of showing the archive up to that moment. “The person responsible saw the format three times and was clear about betting on ‘Viaje…'”, he points out. Now, the program has become a flagship of the public channel, with a success that has also been transferred to the RTVE Play platform and ‘Youtube’, where the chapter dedicated to pop hits in the 70s surpasses the 3.3 million views. Its replacement on La 1, which can already reach thirty shows, according to the director’s figure, also achieves good audiences.

In 2013, Santos and his team handled between 700 and 1,000 tapes to “take the fragments” of the RTVE archive, “ingest them on a hard drive and take them to montages.” “It was crazy. Since then, we have been pioneers with the ARCA system, where all the corporation’s videos are digitized and we can dive them even from home. That has helped us, if not, it would be unthinkable for us to continue with ‘Viaje…’”, says the head of the programme. Thus, the documentary collection continues to digitize documents from the different decades from the territorial centers.

Tribute to Raphaël

Over the course of ten years, this space produced by RTVE itself has produced a total of 134 programs, to which other specials have been added. The new stage of ‘Viaje…’ will start tonight with the chapter ‘It seems like yesterday’, dedicated to the before and after of groups and soloists of all styles, from Shakira to Camela, passing through Los Chichos, Laura Pausini, Pimpinela, Short Celtics or Ricky Martin.

Next week, the space offers a tribute to the peculiar way of understanding the musical recordings of the filmmaker Valerio Lazarov and, later on, TVE will broadcast specials dedicated to Raphael and another with the best interviews and performances in the different programs hosted by Mercedes Milá.

There will also be installments in which Eurovision will be very present: ‘Euroversiones’, with the different adaptations that have been made of the festival’s themes and ‘Marcados por Eurovisión’, a portrait of the artists who have continued to sing the Eurovision songs throughout of the years. Finally, ‘Viaje’ will focus on two fundamental decades in the history of music with ’80 and pop’, dedicated to the best-selling singles of that period, and ’60 and pop’, with the sixties hits that remain on the collective memory.