María Teresa Campos has died and it has been against her will. “Before dead than invisible!”, I wrote of her imperious hunger for a set and booth, camera and microphone. She needed her focus: her intimate drive for media prominence pushed her entire life, it was an overwhelming drive that made her the most powerful communicator in Spain.
“Asshole!”, thundered María Teresa Campos, looking at the camera live, in September 2004. “Asshole!”, she insulted Paolo Vasile, “capo” of Telecinco, from Antena 3, who had not wanted to renew her program contract. Day by Day (1996-2004) for the emoluments she considered she deserved.
Explosive woman, sometimes haughty, arrogant, arrogant, with reasons: she had reached screen shares of 30%, something unheard of. Because with María Teresa Campos on screen you knew that something would happen, that she would rebuke or fight with something or someone, that her conceit would move you to hate or admire her, and that even hating her you would look askance at her, and this is gold in bar for communication .
On the back of journalism, from the interview to the gathering or the debate, María Teresa Campos communicated like no one else, sometimes at the expense of herself... or her dear daughters (Terelu and Carmen), who learned from her mother that contracts succulents and maximum visibility demands the sacrifice of handing over the soul in strips or shreds, of exploding oneself like a bomb.
As a four-year-old girl, a forgotten bomb from our civil war exploded on her street in Malaga and its rabid splinters injured little Mayte, who returned home –dad pharmacist, mother at work– under her own power. They called her “the girl with the bomb”, a girl tattooed by trinitrotoluene that she understood forever that the real bomb was her.
And that's why it was explosive and that's why nothing and nobody could stop it. “Asshole!”, he would yell at Paolo Vasile, but before that he had strung out Jesús Hermida, the great sacred cow of television journalism in Spain. She rebuked him and she was unfair, she was arbitrary, exaggerated, demagogic, populist or unfounded, but that didn't matter to us: it always likes to see someone who stands up to the boss.
María Teresa Campos was convinced of her powers and her gifts, and she used them: if she called Vasile an “asshole” it was because she was convinced that the Italian would regret not having renewed her. It was not like that: surpassed by Ana Rosa Quintana, she Campos returned to Telecinco when she needed money and visibility, apologizing and swallowing that Terelu was humiliated every afternoon (and in Las Campos, degrading reality).
But she had plenty of reasons to believe she was a queen: her journalistic career was brilliant, first on the radio, where she worked with the greats (she teamed up with Iñaki Gabilondo on the Ser chain) and hosted programs when the contracts were millionaires.
And then on television: In the morning (1986), the program that inaugurated the morning broadcasts on TVE –Jesús Hermida in front– catapulted her to stardom. Hermida surrounded herself with women journalists, and the most bellicose was Campos, who ate up Hermida's land and hers was her Nemesis: "wait a minute, boss," she objected, scolding him and ruffling his hair. Hermida was excited to argue with that rebellious Malaga.
His stellar morning section was Bet on one, which confirmed his capacity for dialectic and spectacle. Over the years, she would replace Jesús Hermida and would become the "queen of the mornings", due to her audiences and her impetuous charisma. Her taste for her debate would lead her to become a pioneer in morning political gatherings, a television genre that is still in vogue.
Later, Campos would be the queen of the afternoons on weekends with What a happy time! (Telecinco), a program dedicated to evoking the lives of famous people from past times (something similar to what she now deserves and will have on the small screen). An explosive septuagenarian, she paired up with comedian Bigote Arrocet (her “piticlín piticlín” would not work) and continued with this program of hers – it would be her last – until 2017.
Mediaset in 2019 terminated its long-term contract with Campos. "You don't leave television, it leaves you," María Teresa Campos predicted in those days, and she knew what she was saying.
