Sitcom set in Franco years draws praise

MADRID, Spain -- Flick on the television in Spain and you see most shows struggling to look American.

Dramas about cops, lawyers and hospital emergency rooms abound, as do tell-all talk shows designed to shock and tease.

But the undisputed king of prime time is both home-grown and wholesome, a mostly lighthearted series based on a dark patch of Spanish history: the dictatorship of Gen. Francisco Franco.

It's the tale of a middle-class Spanish family in the late 1960s and early '70s with children squirming for political, social and sexual freedom and parents desperate to keep them out of trouble.

Antonio Alcantara and his homemaker wife, Merche, watch in awe as their three kids -- and the country -- start to change as pro-democracy fervor mounts in the regime's final years before Franco died in 1975.

Student protests pop up. People travel abroad and see how other Europeans live. The Alcantaras' 22-year-old daughter Ines returns from a visit to London wearing -- horrors! -- a miniskirt and in love with a British boy with long hair.

Meanwhile, televisions become fixtures in Spanish living rooms, making the world smaller and Spaniards even more restless.

The series' title -- "Cuentame Como Paso," which means "tell me how it happened" -- comes from a song that was popular in the '60s and serves as the soundtrack for the series.

The show's depiction of Spaniards as they used to be -- timid and sleepy, but rousing from three decades of right-wing rule -- has won both critical and popular acclaim (with an average audience of 5.4 million, compared to 3.5 or 4 million for the average Spanish drama series).

"It reflects where we Spaniards come from, it reflects our immediate history and what that past was like," said series director Tito Fernandez, who at 71 remembers it all vividly. "It is important that people know."

Spain is now a modern democracy of 40 million people, nearly 40 percent of whom had either not been born when Franco died in 1975 or were too small to remember him.

These days just a handful of Franco statues remain -- even the one in his home town El Ferrol was removed -- and most streets named after him have been rechristened. The general's crusade to whip Spain into a culturally unified, church-going and submissive nation is a museum piece.

So for young people -- one of the show's several loyal audiences, according to state-run TVE, which broadcasts it -- the series is a window on a past they never experienced.

For people who lived under Franco and are old enough to recall it, the program provides a mostly candy-coated taste of nostalgia.

Miguel Angel Bernardeau, the show's creator and executive producer, said it's a hit because Spaniards needed a groundbreaking program on a key part of their history.

"People are not stupid, and they like things that are well-done," said Bernardeau, 42. "They like to laugh and cry, and they like to be told a story."

"What's more, after the show they turn off the TV and children ask, 'Dad, is it true? Were there really police that beat you?,'" Bernardeau said.

Franco and the worst of his regime are mainly a silent presence. Jailing, repression and execution of political opponents are nowhere to be seen.

About the most violent scene is one where his son Toni, a gangly university student with a crush on a campus protest leader named Marta, is chased, beaten by police at a rally and arrested. Alcantara Sr. fears his whole family is doomed by association.