Do not adjust your set. There's no point.

I was back in Britain last weekend, accompanying my mother back home after she'd been visiting for a fortnight. Normally we'd spend pretty much every day she's here down at the town's open-air swimming pool, but the weather was not quite as reliable as it usually is during July, so we did have a couple of days where we didn't really get out.

This meant the TV was on for at least a few hours during those two weeks which, the recent World Cup aside, essentially never happens in our house. The reasons for this are twofold; we prefer, during summer particularly, to be out enjoying the lake, the pool or the countryside, and Spanish telly is bad. Really bad. I write that in reasonable confidence that I'm not going to offend any of my Spanish friends because I've never heard anybody disagree with the sentiment here.

Fortunately, there's a button on our remote control which means that any programme which is dubbed into Spanish from any other language (and here that's absolutely all of them - they don't use subtitles for that purpose at all) can be switched to its original format, thereby enabling my dear mother to watch her favourite police procedurals in English. That, though, does not solve the problem of the quality of the broadcasting itself. 

That dubbing issue first, though. Now don't get me wrong - the Spanish voice actors who dub these films and TV programmes are excellent. They manage to start and stop the speech at the same time as the original actors and generally do a good job. But there's only a limited number of them, and they try to have the same actor voiced by the same voice actor for everything. While that makes sense, it means that, say, John Turturro sounds like Arnold Schwarzenegger, because it's the same bloke voicing both of them. (I've used two random names, but they serve to illustrate my point.) It jolts you out of a film if the voice is wrong, their mouths aren't moving right, and you're pretty sure you heard that shaven-headed baddie speaking as Howard Wolowitz on The Big Bang Theory only last week. There's also a pretty widespread view here that this has contributed to holding back the learning of English in Spain. Across the border in Portugal, for example, everything is subtitled so people are hearing English spoken on TV and in cinemas all the time. Some of the young shop workers I've spoken to in Chaves have American accents because of the TV, but more of them have a decent level of English than seems to be the case here.

Anyway, I was supposed to be complaining about Spanish telly. Let's take the biggest bugbear of most, the adverts. Pretty much everybody uses the ad break to make a cup of tea or channel hop, right? Or text their mates, or whatever. That's fine if it only lasts three or four minutes but what if, say, an ad break in the middle of a half-hour programme lasted 23 minutes? This is not an exaggeration - it can be well over 20 minutes at a time. They actually put captions up if they're 'only' going for seven minutes, as if it's no time at all. This can also happen at inexplicable moments - you've watched the first hour and fifty minutes of a two-and-a-quarter-hour film uninterrupted by ads, for example, and then you're made to wait 20 minutes for the last chunk while they play ads. How many people are going to stick around in those circumstances?

The different channels from the same groups each also go to ads at the same time no matter where they are in the programme, so you can't escape them (on their network at least) by channel hopping. This leads to ads just popping up on screen, with no ident screen or pause, quite literally mid-sentence. So here's how watching an episode of The Simpsons can play out, for example:

The episode will start with no discernible gap from the previous programme. There's no ident, no announcement, nothing. The show just starts. This can mean that if you've stepped away for even one minute you can come back and be watching a different episode of the same programme without realising it.

For The Simpsons, though, some channels do at least run a shortened version of the intro. As soon as the intro's finished, they head off for adverts. 'Volvemos en 7 minutos', they announce cheerfully. Back in seven minutes. Assuming you're still there when they come back, you may get a few seconds of actual programming. This is not an exaggeration - it can be less than a single sentence and *bop* suddenly you're watching three more minutes of adverts. So you've seen the intro and ten seconds of the episode in just under 14 minutes. Or haven't seen, because you've switched off.

Much worse than the adverts, though, are the tertulias. A tertulia is an informal gathering of people for a discussion, but in this context refers to the chat shows. There are literally dozens of them across all the networks. They're absolutely inescapable on TV here and, let me tell you, dear reader, chatting they ain't. None of my chats with my mates are anything like these. As many as eight people yelling at each other simultaneously about today's political news or, much more likely, celebrity gossip. Relentless, hysterical, asinine and utterly vacuous, this can be two or three hours of the cousin of a Big Brother contestant being 'grilled' by celeb culture 'experts' about their relative, while the same images of said cousin are repeated over and over and over again on one half of the screen. In the unlikely event anybody cares what they're saying, it's impossible to make out (to my English ears at any rate) what's being said because absolutely everybody is hollering at the same time. Horrible and inexplicably ubiquitous - this is, after all, the country that spawned Hola! magazine and myriad competitors.

Then there's the news. Not the sober, neutral, report-the-facts-and-don't-speculate stuff I'm used to on the Beeb. Some of the news bulletins here leave me open-mouthed in astonishment at their speculation or even outright accusations on criminal cases. 'Why did she do it?' ran one headline along the bottom of a screen recently, relating to a murder case that had not yet gone to trial. Absolutely unthinkable in Britain. To finish off any credibility some of the news has here, and to bring me back to the adverts I've already said ruin everything, the news also stops for them midway through. Now I'm not talking about ITN taking a break and coming back in a couple of minutes. I mean the newsreader him/herself stops during the programme and reads out adverts for sofas, or cars, or mobiles. The person you were just hearing tell you about six fatalities in a forest fire is now trying to flog you car insurance on behalf of the news's sponsor. What does that say about the impartiality of the bulletin? What if that channel's Chief Exec was caught with their 'hand in the till'? Or the network received a nice manila envelope stuffed with cash and a two-year contract renewal promise from their ever-generous sponsors provided they not mention the devastating fire at their factory in far-off never-you-mind-where? Do we think we'd hear about that on their news?

So there you go, this blog's first negative entry on life here. It's easy, when there's so much crap on British telly as well, to take it for granted. The BBC in particular though, reminds just how good it is when viewed against Spanish stuff. This does weigh very lightly on the scales, at least; as I've said, this stuff doesn't matter too much in our house because, apart from for live football, we never switch it on. The telly's pretty much superfluous when there's so much to do, so much to appreciate, so much to love here. It's just as well that's the case, though, dear Spaniards, because, with all due respect, TV here is bloody awful.