José María Carrascal (El Vellón, Madrid, 1930) has died at almost 93 years old and has said goodbye to sixty-five continuous years of journalism. He pursued his passion until the end: last Tuesday he published his last column in the ABC newspaper. The arrival of private television in Spain in 1990 made him famous: he presented Antena 3's midnight news and soon became a television icon. His breaking ties, his dislocated diction and his vitriolic criticisms against the government of Felipe González brought him immense popularity. His phrasing of foreign newspaper headlines also contributed, which made him much imitated by comedians.
His news was his own: he accompanied the news with his editorial opinion, sometimes half-sitting in the corner of his table. "If a man has reached the age of 50 and does not speak his mind, he has failed in life", he answered me a few months after his debut, when I asked him if he was not afraid to attack the government so virulently socialist of Spain, then all-powerful due to his absolute majority in Congress.
José María Carrascal had just turned 60 and we Spanish viewers were not used to senior reporters or such caustic commentary. "You will end up in prison", he explained to me that some followers, still sensitive to the memory of Franco's repression, warned him. But Carrascal was not afraid: he came from the United States, where he had worked as a journalist for thirty years, and where he had learned bellicose journalism as a counter-power. Carrascal inaugurated in Spain a style frequented later by other radio and television firms.
José María Carrascal's first vocation, for which he trained in Barcelona, was as a sailor: "It was the only way to get out of a closed Spain and see the world", he confessed to me. He left Spain in 1957 and did not return until 1990. He ended up leaving the navy because of the little time it left for his true vocation: writing! He lived for a time in Germany and moved to the United States. He wrote all genres of journalism, and also novels. A novel of his, Goovie, inspired by hippies in the United States, won the Nadal prize (1972) and the Ciutat de Barcelona prize (1973). He published twenty books in his life, including fiction and essays.
After thirty-three years outside of Spain, he doubted whether he should accept Antena 3's offer. He consulted the singer Julio Iglesias, his friend, who advised him: "Our compatriots are very bastards and they will give you bad times, but you will have a great time! Accept and go, without selling your apartment in New York”. Carrascal paid attention to him and never regretted it, despite his opinion that "Spain is a country full of fists", as he told me in 1991. Carrascal continued to summer in his New York apartment with his wife Ellen , born in Germany. They had no children and were very happy.
José María Carrascal retired from television - after a last incursion with Xavier Sardà in the program Todos somos humanos -, but he did not stop publishing books and articles in the press during these last twenty years. He was a sharp and fine journalist, with a liberal-conservative pen, a dialogical, affable and transparent personality, a nice, polite and good man who endearingly quoted us "at the stroke of midnight" the next day, and now our date already is eternal
