In 1989, Bette Davis, Salvador Dalí and the heralded television broadcast of the chimes died, as we had known them from 1962 until then. And he did it in style: thanks to the big mistake made by Marisa Naranjo. But confusing the first four grapes with the fourth wasn’t the only TV failure that night. Antena 3, in testing for months and which would be inaugurated on January 25, 1990, had decided to take advantage of the end of the year to light a pre-recorded broadcast of the grapes with Mayra Gómez Kemp as mistress of ceremonies, which, due to last minute technical problems, could not see the light – the file was saved for the first time in 2013 -. Regardless, Antena 3 was right in the when – the highest audience moment of the year –, in the who – a familiar face of television for Spaniards of several generations – and in the how – on screen, with speech, and not as a simple narrator. The television competition was born in Spain, everything has changed.
The following year, the chimes moved from a quasi-journalistic program to a television show. At La 1, the hosts of such a show were Tuesday 13a sure bet: since 1983, they have participated in the New Year’s Eve special, of which they were the absolute protagonists in 1989. In 90, the carillons were understood as a logical extension of their New Year’s Eve special. A young Minerva Piquero debuted on Antena 3 and on Telecinco they followed the same strategy that the San Sebastián de los Reyes channel had tried to implement the previous year, with a legendary presenter: Laura Valenzuela. Regional channels have gradually become associated with this event, trying to seduce with their own face the viewer most attached to the local scene.
The private sector discovered from its premiere that the hegemony of the carillons belonged to TVE. It didn’t matter who passed through their respective balconies at Puerta del Sol: neither the familiar faces (Carmen Sevilla, José María Iñigo and Jesús Puente had their chance on Telecinco, Constantino Romero and Matías Prats Cañete on Antena 3), nor the contemporary emblems of the network’s success (the cast of There is no one living here He gave them three times on Antena 3 and Paula Vázquez, Mercedes Milá and Manel Fuentes, on Telecinco) managed to overcome the supremacy of TVE. Even Chiquito de la Calzada himself, at his peak (1994), failed to harm the Ente. The spectator is a creature of habit and even more so when he must reach an intergenerational consensus. The cape of Ramón García, co-presenter of the event on TVE from 1995 to 2006, seemed to function like Harry Potter’s invisibility cloak, but applied to his competitors: during the 90s, the 2000s and the first half of the 1910s, there was not a single year in which the sum of the audiences of the bells of Antena 3 and Telecinco even reached half of RTVE’s audience. Even the birth of two more actors – in 2005 Cuatro and in 2006 La Sexta – did not affect the big part of the pie.
Telecinco marked its milestones in 2009 with Belén Esteban and especially in 2011 with Isabel Pantoja, Kiko Rivera and Jorge Javier, with more than three million viewers, but these were dreams of a winter night. Where something began to change was in Atresmedia from 2014. In retrospect, the incorporation of Cristina Pedroche in its chimes – the first year of La sexta, from 2015 on Antena 3 –, inseparable from the unknown of her dress, seems to mark the birth of an intelligent guideline: if we cannot manage someone else’s custom, let’s at least try to create our own. Television successes are sometimes born from a mistake, as happened with Mayra; Other times, they do it by chance or by the audacity of those who have little to lose. And others of a movement which manifests itself through walking. Because in an industry as conservative as television, no one wants to change something that isn’t broken. Antena 3 gained a million viewers from the bells of 2014 to those of 2015 and almost two million from those of 2016 to those of 2017. And it overtook TVE in 2021 after the loss of Ana Obregón due to COVID and her replacement by Jacob Petrus, in 2022 Ana Obregón y los Morancos, and in 2023 Ana Mena and Jenni Hermoso. Because in competition, the mistakes of others also count as your own successes.
TVE struck again, sorry, in 2024 with Broncano and Lalachus, using the strategy that had not served its competitors – contemporary faces of its success – and in 2025, after the loss of Buenafuente and Silvia Abril, they decided to appeal to the millennial audience as owners of home control with Chenoa and Estopa and they won again. Much attention is paid to the chimes and little to what precedes them, and to the three previous broadcasts of La 1, i.e. The house of musicthe special by José Mota (the tradition since 2007 has only been interrupted twice) and the 2025 summary made by Carlos del Amor were the second, third and fourth most watched spaces of the night, ahead of the bells of Pedroche and Chicote. Calling the fall of Antena 3 a failure is not fair to the network’s achievements over the past ten years. In the same way, as happened during the farewells of 1989, mistakes do not weigh as much on some as on others and Atresmedia still needs TVE to fail to win.
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