Bullfighting as television entertainment during the Franco regime

Abstract

This paper analyses bullfighting programming featured on Spanish public television (TVE) between 1956 and 1975. As such, it covers live broadcasts of corridas, specialist news programmes and related documentary films broadcast during the final twenty years of the Franco dictatorship. Given that no actual footage has been preserved, other material such as broadcast schedules published in the press, newspaper sections devoted to the subject and archive collections of bullfighting magazines have been examined and analysed in order to reconstruct a clear picture of programming in this genre offered by TVE during the period. It also provides a critical assessment of the ways in which the Franco regime sought to use bullfighting-related programming to promote tourism and pursue other economic objectives as well as an evaluation of the contribution of live broadcasts of corridas to the technological development of television in Spain and the gradual professionalisation of journalism devoted to this particular topic. Bull-fighting related programming did much to stimulate public interest in the medium as well as the world of tauromachy.