Operacion resfriado

Men in white coats give me the fear.

I fear them so because they don't play by international rules. Normally, when abroad in a first world country, if you need something and don't know how to ask for it, you pray to the gods of globalisation and invoke one of their patron saints.

Tiene un Kleenex? Da me los Marlboros! Una paqueta de Duracell, por favor. From chocolate to car tyres, if you sprechenzie capitalism, you can't go far wrong.

But all of that goes out of the window when you walk into a chemist. Lemsip? Shake of the head. Anadin? Blank look. Savlon? You must be joking, mate.

Equally unhelpful is the Spanish tendency towards purely functional medicinal packaging. The raison d'etre of UK medicines can usually be determined by the law of inverse proportions: that is, whatever the smiling photograph shows most is the very action that would otherwise be precluded by the ailment. A man on a bicycle is a surefire sign of haemorrhoid cream; an opera singer symbolises throat soothers. Even the names can give a clue, such as Blisteze and Clearasil.

Not here. All medicine boxes are kept behind glass. The universal colour scheme/design is 'igloo furniture by IKEA'. The names read as though they were invented by a Scrabble bag and the drug companies have clubbed together to buy up the world supply of Verdana. There are no clues. And Spain - a country where many over-the-counter drugs are only available elsewhere by photo-identifiable, handcuffed to your wrist, 'turn the keys on three' prescriptions - is not the place to grab something and hope for the best.

Attempts to solicit what you're after are also fraught with danger. Pointing at your nose could get you acne cream or hair remover. Coughing could get you Nicorette patches; attempting to translate 'decongestant' could easily lead to a diarrhetic.

Yes, | have a cold. Perhaps it serves me right for sending (in my opinion) highly amusing emails to everyone in London about the weather over there, but either way, I'm buggered if I'm going to a chemist. This one's going to have to be cured by oranges and tea.

Still, where there's mucus there's brass and a late night/early morning coughing fit led me fortuitously to discover the delights on offer on early morning Spanish TV.

The quality and quantity of a country's television is usually a good barometer as to how highly developed its fast food industry is. Things here are as befits a nation currently offering pizza but no dial-a-curry.

Though I can pick up 13 terrestrial channels on the ropey portable in my flat (and a fuzz hinting at plenty of scrambled others), most TV here is pretty poor at the best of times - dubbed films, a few This Morning/Jerry Springer hybrids, two music video channels (one Spanish only; a few nights ago one of the videos froze and it took them half an hour to even notice) and three Catalan channels that keep the four-fingered flag flying, albeit cheaply.

In the last week or so, the TV at all hours (and most of the nation too) has been giddy with Operacion Triunfo. Even those channels who didn't have the rights to it have spent hours discussing and interviewing the 'stars'. Operacion Triunfo, if you aren't aware, is the Pop Idol-style show that each year provides Spain with its entrant to the Eurovision Song Contest. It's as truly hideous as everything that sentence implies.

Elsewhere in TV land, one of the main national channels here has just been taken over by Silvio Berlusconi, an Italian politician and medialomaniac of sufficient subtlety to make Rupert Murdoch look like Rupert the Bear. The first thing the channel did after this change of proprietor was cancel its phenomenally popular satirical comedy sketch show. It didn't bother to give a reason.

Two of the other channels are government-owned and controlled, bigging up the shifty looking pro-war President Aznar at every opportunity. With many politicians out of bounds, the Pope apparently infallible, and it actually being illegal here to criticise the King (punishable by between six months and two years in jail), television satire not surprisingly struggles.

Still, one of the government's channels last week screened live the Spanish Oscars, known as the Goyas, and succeeded in giving a mouthpiece to four solid hours of anti-Aznar vitriol as winner after winner appeared wearing a 'No a la guerra' badge (all the rage here now).

Anyway. At 6.30am following a mostly sleepless night, I soon discovered that Buenas Dias TeleVision is delivered with a disturbing dose of the surreal.

A couple of channels had breakfast news as expected; one showed dubbed reruns of old Neighbours episodes back when Cody was about 12 (I felt sure I was hallucinating by this point); but my search for some form of Juan-ny Vaughan led me to click on the station that had previously only shown phone-in tarot card readers. Wall-to-wall. At all hours. But not, I now know, at 6.30am. At 6.30am, it's Sex Pond.

Sex Pond was hosted by a late 30s female host who lay uncomfortably across a couch while the camera slowly zoomed in and out focussing on (and practically climbing in for the winter) her ample cleavage and fishnet tights. As she took a 'phone call' from a bored-sounding actress pretending to describe fantasies of threesomes, the camera pulled back further and I gradually realised that raised on a plinth behind her was a large television showing graphic, hardcore pornography. Everything about the show oozed class, right down to her not bothering to remove her wedding ring. Actually, on second thoughts, perhaps that's part of the desired effect. And to think I used to have my breakfast at this time in London.

Still, a swift and slightly nauseous change of channel brought all manner of other reactions as I was presented with a sudden close-up of the number 159 bus stop on Regent Street - my old bus stop, in fact. This proved to be an opening shot for That's English!, a language learning program which featured Jeffrey Holland and Celia Imrie speaking v-e-r-y s-l-o-w-l-y while taking the piss out of British tennis players.

Transfixed, as only someone with mucus-induced homesickness can be, I watched agog as Jeff and Celia ended their slow-mo comedy, took a bow and two presentable Spaniards stepped forward to present a chintz-covered Barcablog in reverse.

For example:

Spanish woman: "It's time for lunch."
Spanish man: "Let's go to a restaurant then. What time is it?"
Spanish woman: "Three o'clock."
Spanish man: "Oh. I think the restaurant is closed."

And then later on:

Spanish man: "I'd like to rent a room."
English woman: "Certainly. Of course you realise you can't smoke in here."
Spanish man: "Oh. Well, can I invite friends round?"
English woman: "Yes, but they have to leave by 10pm."

By the end I was thoroughly enamoured with Gonzalez and Anna's hapless attempts to get by in London, only to be frustrated at every turn by those pesky English and their ways. No matter how strong the obstacle, they never lost their patience and managed never to revert to just saying Spanish with increasing volume until they got their way. Quite sweet really.

Still, cold or no cold, I couldn't help but sniff with sympathy at what happened next. It began with our heroes sat on a bus, trying to understand the conductor ("I said two 70s, not 2.70"). They taught their watching students, with requisite po-faced sans-serif caption, 'traffic-jam'.

Eventually, faced with hideous congestion on Oxford Street in these halcyon, pre-Charge days, our hosts hopped off the bus. "We can't be late for our appointment", they exclaimed. "Let's go by Tube." They buy their tickets, go through the barriers and head straight for a platform on the Central Line.

Berlusconi, do your worst. Television satire is alive and well after all.

Posted by Andrew Losowsky at February 6, 2003 04:16 PM | TrackBack