More than a million viewers follow the family broadcast of La 1 on Saturday and Sunday during siesta
It’s four in the afternoon on any Saturday. The family has just eaten and is waiting for the coffee while they watch the weather forecast offered after the ‘Telediario’. Once finished, and almost without blinking an eyelid, the afternoon film begins to mimic the same schedule as the previous and the previous week: pleasant landscapes, small villages, charismatic characters and a love story that, despite starting with a certain dose of drama , it always ends with a nice ending that the grandma and grandson love. It’s the formula of the German ‘telefilm’ that has triumphed on the weekend afternoons of La 1 for almost eight years, already a classic on the small screen.
It was in 2014 when TVE tried to find its niche with a whiter and more elusive kind of fiction that distanced itself from the “thriller” Antena 3 airs simultaneously, also with great audience success, in its “Multicine” container. While the Atresmedia chain has been betting on shady “TV movies” for nearly two decades, featuring kidnappings, murders or women at risk, the public company took a risk with one hundred percent alternative content: weddings, divorces, reconciliations, stories of victories. With beautiful and mostly wealthy people. The performances are also not lacking in light and color, because these generally gray Central European landscapes never feature cloudscapes. And it is always summer to make the company quite pleasant during the siesta. The screen share fluctuates between 10% and 12% of ‘share’, with about 1.2 million viewers, surpassing the chain’s average, which stood at 9.5% in May.
When they started the TVE experiment, they pointed out that this product, “in relation to value for money”, was a perfect fit for La 1. The directors noticed in the audience a certain exhaustion from other more intense films, mainly American ones, that were offered until that hour. Although they played well-known actors, they were generally reruns of commercial film screenings that viewers had already seen more than once. The premieres of the great ‘majors’ were left behind for ‘prime time’, while Spanish cinema kept its share of already experienced spaces such as ‘Cine neighborhood’, ‘Versión Española’ or ‘Historia de nos cine’.
During a year, La 1 is estimated to broadcast nearly 300 titles in its programming. On Sundays, for example, three such productions are broadcast in succession. Its duration is not exaggerated and neither is its flexibility for broadcasting, which is highly valued by programmers. The architects of this profitable success are the production companies Frankfurter Filmproduktion New Media (FFP New Media) and Bavaria Fernseçhproduktion GmbH. The ‘telefilms’ are sold for broadcast and subsequent distribution by the German public television ZDF, signing agreements with other countries as different as Mexico, Malaysia or Morocco.
The productions not only have the same uniformity in shooting, but also share a cast of actors. There are also cycles that have a common connection, although the stories are a priori different. This is the case with the films entitled ‘A Summer in…’, which are set in cities around the world where the protagonists are having the vacation of a lifetime. Among these places are Oxford, Antwerp or Salamanca, where one of these films was shot in 2019. The film ‘A summer in Salamanca’, which tells the story of two sisters who go to the province to help restore a traditional route, has been offered several times by the first TVE channel.
Another classic are the stories based on the romantic novels by the English writer Rosamunde Pilcher, a cycle that began in Germany in 1993 and continues to bring together millions of viewers for television. So much so that the public broadcaster ZDF and the author received the British Tourism Award for the tourism promotion of Cornwall and Devon, where the television films were shot, reaching up to 250,000 Germans a year.
In addition, since Monday, La 1 has been testing the ‘TV movies’ daily, after dinner, in anticipation of the arrival of the Tour de France and the Vuelta a España. In this case, the chain is currently opting for American and Canadian products, but with a smaller audience than its German ‘rivals’.
Source: La Verdad
I’m Wayne Wickman, a professional journalist and author for Today Times Live. My specialty is covering global news and current events, offering readers a unique perspective on the world’s most pressing issues. I’m passionate about storytelling and helping people stay informed on the goings-on of our planet.
