I have cried with laughter about two thousand times with the videos of Javier Cárdenas interviewing the supposed psychic Carlos Jesús, that man who appeared in a purple tunic saying that several million ships were going to come to our planet from Raticulín and Antercherán and that he was capable of being one and three, since in addition to Carlos Jesús he split into Cristofer and Micael. The prequel of the tweeter. Those were the years of the program On the attackby Alfonso Arús, which I recorded on VHS tapes to spend the afternoons at home in tears. I can imagine what you are thinking, but I take comfort in the thought that there are worse plans.
Where I saw humour then, I now detect mockery and ridicule towards someone who is not well. Not well, which is the elegant way of not playing at being a psychologist or a psychiatrist by naming things. In times when mental health is finally part of the public conversation, who would dare to put their ankle in such a puddle?
It’s August 2024, and in the absence of summer soap operas, Mediaset is enjoying itself like a pig in a cornfield with the attitude of Maite Galdeano, mother of the contestant of realities Sofía Suescun. Maite is a funny woman, who was a bus driver in Pamplona, who boasts of not opening her wallet and who overnight started recording videos on her Instagram profile saying that Suescun and her boyfriend have thrown her out of the house, that her son-in-law is scum, a bad rat and that he manipulates his child. Opinions that you may have about some of her political children, although they do not record videos dressed in a bath towel at unsociable hours as Galdeano has done.
Another woman who is not well, and they repeat it constantly on the programmes, while they have the greatest fun sending reporters to the doors of the house in La Manga del Mar Menor, in case she wants to tell us something or we might witness her next outbreak. Maite compulsively sends messages to the collaborators, making a killing for them and doing herself a terrible job. An ambulance should be sent to her, not a young man with a microphone. She is not well, they repeat. But there they are.
As they are to cover the murder of Mateo, aged 11, in Mocejón (Toledo). As they are to interview a neighbour from the village who will tell them that the detainee had problems, of course. “Autism, schizophrenia, something like that”, he will say. Another one who is not well.
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