EDUARDO ÁLVAREZ
Updated on Friday, 23July2021-02: 14
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July 1970 A white suit without pockets
In 1958, in all of Spain
there were barely 30,000 television receivers
.
Practically no one knew what that was about TVE, whose first broadcasts, two years earlier, had been a prodigy for the time.
And almost no Spaniard knew Eurovision either, which had also just started shooting.
But, oh magic! In the spring of 1958 on radios throughout Europe, also in our country,
Nel blu dipinto di blu
, better known as
Volare
, was playing incessantly
.
Domenico Modugno
he was the artist of the moment.
And everyone began to talk about him, about his triumph at the San Remo Festival, first, and how that victory had served him to represent Italy in Eurovision that same year, where, although he was third, he was catapulted to the Olympus of world fame.
In Benidorm, then
a charming fishing village of about 5,000 residents
, its mayor Pedro Zaragoza Orts, various political positions of the Movement and some journalists shared a gathering in a famous kiosk on a torrid summer night and dreamed aloud of putting their town on the map of the incipient international tourism in the way that San Remo had done, which was talked about and talked about non-stop with
Volare
playing in the background.
No sooner said than done.
A year later Benidorm hosted what was called I Festival de la Canción La Voz de Madrid -the name was imposed in
1959
by the main subsidiary of the Movement
Station
Network
that organized the sarao-, the germ of which would become the most famous Benidorm Festival, whose last edition was held in 2006.
Year 2021. On May 22, the grand finale of the 65th edition of Eurovision was held, with the overwhelming victory of a rock band, Maneskin. The Old Continent fell in love with Italian music again and the excellent results that, year after year, the RAI obtains in the European song contest with the artists who achieve their pass after winning the competitive and very successful
San Remo Festival
were praised.
, which after so many decades continues to paralyze Italy every February and garner multimillion-dollar television audiences.
It is the same night, the Murcian Blas Cantó,
in line with most of our representatives in recent years
, had to settle for a third to last place. Criticism of the public corporation intensified. And, just a few days later, the newly elected president of RTVE, José Manuel Pérez Tornero, resoundingly promised: "We are going to take Eurovision very seriously."
As in 1959, said and done. The state radio television announced yesterday that Benidorm will host at the beginning of next year a great musical event in which our representative will be chosen for the Eurofestival 2022. Thanks to
an agreement signed between RTVE, the Generalitat Valenciana and the Alicante city council
, It is going to revive the Benidorm Festival, yes, with necessarily renewed airs and with the ambition that it be consolidated and become an annual meeting point to promote Spanish music.
«We want Benidorm to be a meeting point for what we need most now: music, Europe and diversity.
With the Benidorm Festival we intend to achieve an emotional and tourist reactivation of the Valencian Community
”, the regional president, Ximo Puig, said yesterday.
The now mythical contest lived its glorious years in the 60s and 70s, when numerous towns bathed by the Mediterranean had
their own song contests that competed with each other
and, on the other side of the pond, the experience became popular in events such as the Viña del Mar Festival, in Chile, which today maintains its momentum.
Participating - let alone winning - in Benidorm was a truly important opportunity for the new talents of national music.
There are countless singers who took the Alicante stage during those years:
the Dynamic Duo, Raphael, Bruno Lomas, Karina, Víctor Manuel, Manolo Otero, Emilio José
, Eduardo Rodrigo, Mochi, Juan Camacho, Dyango ...
Aretha Franklyn, in 1973 EFE
But when it comes to the link between Benidorm and Eurovision, it is impossible not to remember the Spanish singer who has achieved the greatest universal success ever achieved by an artist from our country: Julio Iglesias. The Madrilenian won Benidorm in 1968 with the song Life continues the same. And he was so shy that they almost had to drag him out on stage. That victory, which immediately turned him into a mass idol in our country, led TVE officials to ask him to participate in the contest in which a representative for Eurovision was chosen. He won it. And there he was planted, in 1970, with Gwendolyne.
He was seen by more than 200 million people, throughout
Europe, South America, Morocco or the USSR
. They made him - it was not the first time - a tailored suit without pockets to avoid the temptation to which he was very given to put his hands in them, who did not know how to move. And the truth is that a great performance did not catch on. Even so, he was fourth. And that night the myth was born that would immediately conquer the planet with its peculiar style and charisma.
After a seven-year hiatus,
the Benidorm Festival began a new stage in 1993
.
For 14 years it was celebrated giving the opportunity to singers and groups such as Coral Segovia, La Década Prodigiosa, Pasión Vega, or Inma Serrano.
They were all hateful comparisons.
And the contest tried in vain to remove the dandruff and win back the interest of the public, especially the youngest, which had evaporated.
We will see if, loosely paraphrasing Celia Cruz, life is a festival, and Benidorm gives another bell in the 21st century.
And, above all, hopefully this is the formula for Spain to leave the
bottom
in Eurovision.
According to the criteria of The Trust Project
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