¡Vivan! ¡Vivan! ¡Vivan las sitcoms! "Ellas son así", "Médico de familia", "Al salir de clase", "Periodistas", "¡Ala...dina!"... yeah, yeah, yeah! Memories just keep rushing back into my mind of my lovely Spanish days a couple of years ago. Quiero escribir en castellano ahora, but I think only English would be allowed, right? ImDb?
As a foreign student in another country, besides making friends, hanging around bar to get to know people to practise the language, during rainy days, what is better than some good TV programmes. (Thank you for helping me to polish the language. ^-^)
All the Spanish sitcoms quoted above gained extremely high popularity inside Spain. What a shame that the our TV channel only secure programmes from, by language, English, Japanese, Korean and Mandarin speaking areas so we keep watching Australian, British, American, Korean and Japanese programme, both TV and movies but we have very little contact with the good stuff of Europe, Middle East, South America or Africa. Well, one may say, strictly speaking, Hong Kong is not an international city in term of TV programmes we can have from free channels, (anyway, I should not be that picky). Seeing that the Japanese TV programme "Oshin" was broadcast in Egypt in 1995, about 12 years after its first release in Japan and Hong Kong, and even in the presently war-stricken Iraq since last year, I hold high hope that Hong Kong and China would see more and more good productions of the other lands.
Amongst all the above sitcom, my first love was and still is "7 vidas". A funny and warm comedy amongst friends and family. I always want to have a mother like Amparo Baró who dares to challenge God when she prays and she is always young and energetic. Congratulations to "Paco" (Javier Cámara) because to a great, great extent, he obtains very much of his fame from this series and later he stepped into the big movie screen. He looks hilarious when he disguises as God and speaks on behalf of HIM in soliloquy holding a star. Two of the movies, "Hable con ella" and "La Mala Educación" he acted in were both directed by Oscar-awarded Pedro Almodóvar, who is more familiar to Hong Kong. Florentino Fernández is another actor whom I do remember because he looks like the big fat ATV (a Hong Kong TV Channel) actor LAU Shek-yin in many ways. "Médico de familia", somehow to me is less original when I think about "ER" or "Chicago Hope".
A detective story like production, "El Camino de Santiago" was once a big attraction during my stay there. English and Spanish were spoken and subtitled, it was claimed that it would be on air in both the USA and Spain because it's a collaboration of both sides. What caught my attention were familiar name of the world know Portuguese actor Joaquim de Almeida and of course the forever Charlton Heston.
Life of journalists, "Periodistas" is perfectly told but one thing I can forget is on one episode, there was an Asian actor who looks like Chinese or Japanese or Korean. I was pretty angry about that episode. I know Spaniards are never xenophobic yet every time this actor needs to say something, he "whispers" to the recipient's ears(this recipient is a white Spaniard), and then the Spaniard retells what he whispers to the audience with a prior explanation that he's shy and the things he tells are important so he doesn't want to let the cat out of the bag. Absurd! There are many Asians in Spain who speak fluent Castilian Spanish. They speak, they don't whisper.
The Spanish TV does acquire quite a lots programme from the other side of the Atlantic. Once I even watched the Spanish voice-overed American produced TV series "Martial Law" starred by a well-known Hong Kong kung-fu star Sammo Hung Kam-Bo. The feeling is strange because I was watching a familiar star who knows Cantonese but was speaking English and then when releasing on Spanish air, it's voice-overed. Suddenly he becomes very unfamiliar, it's the fault of the languages! The TV also imports productions of South America, for instance, Thalia's "Rosalinda" (Mexico) and "Isabella" (Peru). And of course, they were all on show at odd hours where most people are doing other things except watching TV.
How can we amuse ourselves without sitcom? Now I remember the English speaking ones, "Mad about you", "Golden Girls", "Three's company" and blah blah blah.... never ending stories....
