At the traditional reception for those awarded with an Ondas at the Albéniz palace, on the majestic mountain of Montjuic, the press missed the glamor of Úrsula Corberó and the demeanor of Juan Diego Botto, half Spanish and half Argentine, with a lot to say about Javier Milei's victory. Both, recognized in the category of best performer, saved their strength for the gala at the Gran Teatre del Liceu. That's not why the meeting with the press was lackluster. Not entirely, at least. There was somewhere to sink your teeth. Coque Malla is delighted because the award comes from the profession, like the Goya, and that is why this type of recognition feels especially good. He founded Los Ronaldos before turning 18 and that is why this lifetime achievement award fits him like a glove.
Malla has experienced low times and openly admits it: “When things went bad I had no plan B, so I continued playing in clubs for 10 people. And happy and learning.” He has just released the album Although we are dead, so we asked how he would like to be remembered: “They are not going to remember me. We die and life moves forward and no one remembers you, let's face it. The songs are deadly; some will remain, but few. There will be Dylan songs, some Beethoven and little else (laughs).” Faced with such a display of nihilism, we attack the personal side of a father of two children: “Well, I don't know, I want them to live their lives and not think about me too much.” Nothing to do.
The musician has found happiness, or a piece of that puzzle, in getting away from sterile controversies, arguments and baseless discussions. You won't see him getting into a fight on social media. He is calmer being calm. “My job is songs but if there were a civilized debate, of course we would talk about whatever is necessary. However, the delirium is such that there comes a time when you say no, I'm leaving here. You can have civilized conversations about anything, but not on social media anymore; “People are crazy.”
Jorge Drexler, Ondas for the Best Show, Tour or Festival for Tinta y tiempo, summarizes what it has been like this year that is now ending: “We have done 80 concerts in 20 countries and each one does not begin the day we perform but from the moment it begins to be designed. I have the joy and pride of traveling with people I love. We are a team of 15 people on the road, plus the office team and it is like an end-of-year trip: we celebrate together, we are afraid together, we go through anguish, euphoria, late nights, meals in 20 different countries... When you talk about the tour I not only think about that time on stage but about that coffee we had in Lima, in a special cafeteria where they roasted it themselves. Those things".
The doctor who chose to be a musician greets Patrick Criado, Ondas for best actor for Noches de Tefía - awarded jointly with Juan Diego Botto (I don't like to drive, on TNT) - and who was the lover of his wife, Leonor Watling, in the fiction Live without permission. Today he will collect the award for his work on the drama that dozens of homosexuals experienced in a Franco concentration camp in the Canary Islands.
We met him as a child, in Águila Roja, an interpretive experience that he lived as a game and for that very reason, in a more indelible way for him than for many adults. “Christian Bale said in an interview that you cannot compete against children and animals. Because they live it. Movies like The 13 Roses, The Blind Sunflowers… I remember it as if I had lived it.” Already seasoned, this is how he faced the script that his first Ondas gave him: “I felt a lot of vertigo; It almost gave me a panic attack thinking that I wouldn't be able to play a character with those characteristics, with the responsibility that he carries throughout the series, but when you do that exercise, you jump into the void and then you see the result, and above all that it has moved consciences… Ufff. Many people who have nothing to do with this industry have approached me and have been touched by it. With that, it has already been worth it.”
Javier del Pino, director of A vivir que son dos días (Cadena SER) and journalist whose career is one of those studied at the faculty, receives the Ondas for Best Radio Idea shared with Juan José Millás and Paqui Ramos. When Del Pino asked Millás to join his team, the veteran writer and columnist only asked him not to work on Sunday, they joke. Well, at 9 in the morning of every Lord's Day, the couple of reporters dive into experiences, sometimes surreal, that both reveal the secrets of thanatopraxy and find the most unusual elements of the lost and found office.
Millás and Ramos explain that on one of their trips through Spain a tire on their car burst and they almost didn't tell them about it. Fortunately and unexpectedly, Millás emerged as a leader and like an Indiana Jones in La Rioja, he knew how to get out of trouble and managed to get them to come and rescue them after urinating in the gutter. Imagine hearing the anecdote from the mouths of the protagonists. Let's live it's two days is the most listened to radio program in Spain. The secret? Prepare it thoroughly: “In my opinion, making a news report is easy: you take what happened that day, or what they said that day, organize it and make a news report or a discussion. But take a blank sheet of paper and say, let's see, what am I doing that can help me learn something and at the same time..."
The Ondas by Mara Torres should be for 'How to squeeze the interviewee with elegance'. In both El gatopardo and El Faro – a program that has won her the award –, both on SER, she manages to get people to get naked like rarely before. This is the formula. “I study 30 pages of documentation that the team prepares for each guest that includes everything they have said, not what has been published about them, over… Maybe 20 years. Based on this I design the interview. In El Faro they have to feel that they arrive with a pseudonym and say goodbye in a lighthouse as a reference for the listener. In the interview I try to draw that path: no one arrives being a reference; I try to make the path emerge throughout the interview. They are not politicians that I have to judge nor do they have to be accountable to anyone: they come to talk and so that the people who follow them know a little more about them."
Silvia Intxaurrondo, another racial journalist, learned about Ondas from the radio. As it should be, given the medium that illuminates these awards. Those who did not know her gave her a face and surname after that interview with the candidate Alberto Núñez Feijóo on TVE, which she was talked about so much during the campaign: he marked it, pointed out his mistakes and did not let him get away with it. “I am glad that so many colleagues in the profession turned around and said 'we are together to protect our colleagues and to get the truth.' There are people who don't like it when journalists do our jobs, but those attacks have been so minor that I don't even remember them. I only remember a great embrace of the profession, enormous affection and a feeling of pride at truly belonging to the group of journalists in this country.”
