7 vidas

¡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....

Hey, I know by far that Spain produces the best comedy series ever, perhaps even better than any American. I can't say the same of other kind of series, but we are GREAT at comedies. For example: "Aquí no hay quien viva", "Los Serrano", "Aída", "7 Vidas", "Médico de Familia", "Todos los hombres sois iguales", etc, etc, etc... Yeah, we might not be the best making movies, or making mystery series, but we are good with the comedy series. 7 Vidas? A very good example. And, it's not like Friends at all. It's just some kind of humor that makes it singular. The main theme it's not very much. There is a guy who had an accident and was in coma for 18 years. Then his sister, his best friend, his best friend's mother and his cousin try to get him into the world again. The most important thing of 7 Vidas are it's jokes and it's stupid stories, the singularity of the characters that make you laugh. The actors are so good, too. Javier Camera is a genius, Amparo Baró does it pretty well and Anabel Alonso (I gotta say, my favourite) is a great comedian. If you haven't see it yet, you have to see it.

It has been almost five years since "7 vidas" started running on Telecinco. Yeah, it's true that this series has suffered lots of casting and storyline changes, but this only have confirmed that this is a great show, 'cause it´s getting more and more popular, and has attracted many famous people as guest stars. The scripts are very original, truly hilarious; and the actors do a great work, specially Amparo Baró as Sole and Anabel Alonso as Diana. It's got to be mentioned its particular kind of humor, combining perfectly local spanish humour and universal jokes.

Very similar to FRIENDS, where Paz Vega acts like Jennifer Aniston, Blanca Portillo like Courteney Cox, Toni Cantó like David Schwimmer, Javier Cámara like Matthew Perry. There is also Amparo Baró, who is a mix between Phoebe's nonsenses and Joey's arguing with Chandler. Funny, but the cast is not as great as in FRIENDS.

The show clearly started as a vile 'Friends' copy, whoever denies this should pay more attention, some plots and scenes weren't changed at all. But the 'Friends's stage only lasted a couple of years, the post-coma plot disappeared and the series became a standard comedic show. Once there it became repetitive and bland. The kind of humour in this show was formulaic and predictable, just awful. A short conversation always preceded the punchline read by an angry character to the 'dumb' one followed by the canned laughter. Later, they included political jokes, giving a 'political' dimension to some characters, this was, in my view, a mistake.

The cast significantly changed throughout the years, and not for the better. I deeply respect Javier Camera and Amparo Baró's performances but I can't say the same about the rest of the cast. People like Eva Santolaria, Guillermo Toledo or Santi Millán should be kept miles away from a camera.

The success of the show can only be explained with the lack of competition and the abyssal level of Spanish TV.