Angels Barcelo Im hyper competitive and hyper ambitious

Àngels Barceló: “I’m hyper-competitive and hyper-ambitious”

We meet at six in the afternoon with a sun setting in Madrid, although it is almost dinner time for them. He wakes up at 3:59 a.m. to listen to the 4 a.m. “card” of the SER that so often downed the script for Hoy por Hoy (HxH), the morning show he directed for three Years. He comes out of a Pilates class, his “only free hour” of the day, when he disconnects from current affairs and thinks only of “inhale, exhale, and body control.” In the middle of the conversation, he gets a cell phone call from work, which he quickly answers, but his face changes. I remind her of our last conversation in 2008, when she took over the management of the night space Hora 25. She had just come off the helm of the two-day run of ‘gentle’ magazine A Vivir over the weekend, and she confessed to being ‘relaxed’ after discovering there’s life outside of work. Since then it has rained. Even stones.

Questions. After the weekend’s oasis, he returned to the galleys. How did you deal with the change?

Answer. I returned to daily information, which is what I have been doing my whole life. It wasn’t difficult for me to build muscle because I really enjoy doing it. I have been examining myself daily since I was 20. What’s new is that I’ve learned to switch off and calm down. That gave me age. You can’t live your whole life with this level of stress. I’m at a very dangerous age, many people around me had serious health problems and I think about it more and more often. Francine [Carles, director de La ventana] It tells me a lot: you shoot closer and closer.

P Pandemic. ‘Filomena’. La Palma volcano. Ukraine. Those three years were heartbreaking.

R And you leave the hacking that we suffered on the radio and that made us work on the pedals. It was dizzy. Three years of Hoy por Hoy made me 30 years old. I turned gray live. I joke with Emilio Arellano, our outdoor technician, that every new gray hair that comes out has the name of a crisis. Now I’m starting to make the program I want.

P Is your today for today in Mantillas?

R Total. So far we have run survival and fear programs. It’s also true that if you can do it, you can do anything. There were days of six hours alone in the studio. We have picked and shoveled, and we continue to pick so that the child may grow strong and healthy.

P He says he likes it when the script is taken down in extremis. How do you metabolize so much cortisol?

R That’s wonderful. I like to go to the studio with nothing. They are the simplest programs when everything is happening, everything is alive, people enter live. It happened to Ukraine. At 4 I found out about the invasion with the ticket. And people started coming to organize us and tell everything live.

P Didn’t you hesitate when you reported on the spot about this crisis?

R Upside down. He had been in other wars, but not one like this. I like making toppings best. At war or down in the studio on Gran Vía, I’ve been tied to a table for years, but that urge hasn’t gone away. If it was up to me, I’d be telling things from the outside all day long.

P How do you choose your employees?

R I have a nose for talent. I prefer the one who wants to work to the one who thinks he knows everything. Firstly because it allows me to shape them my own way…

P… What you want is barcelona.

R Call it that, yes: that they learn to work the way I like it, and that’s how we get along. A boss told me that it was my sect more than my team. I buy. I want people who would like to work with me. I’m neither better nor worse than others, but I have my stuff and I like that my people give their lives for me. In a figurative sense, of course.

P That’s why they’re so young, most of them.

R I was the little one on the team for a long time. I started presenting a news program on television when I was 20 years old. Then everyone got younger. I need young people because they are more inventive, they have more ideas, they are less afraid of things, they master technology. There are few professionals my age in the media left and that’s a mistake too.

P Be the biggest annoyance?

R No, because the people who are now entering the profession will not live what I lived. Being able to practice journalism with the media and when the relationship to power was different. You will have it easier in other things, but not in the practice of journalism as I understand it. I did it out of rigor, decency and honesty. I don’t have a bad taste in my mouth. Here I am, 58 years old.

P How is the relationship to power now?

R Well, in many cases out of friendship, if not collusion. Almost all of the blame for the bad reputation of the trade lies with us. We put journalism in a hooligan loop that I didn’t prepare for. Now we see journalists going into politics and vice versa. Boundaries have been crossed in both directions and that has done the profession a disservice. I’m not a friend of any politician. I think this distance is good for journalism.

P Do some of you walk out of the interviews raw?

R A lot. More and more they know how to go raw. If you don’t want to, don’t answer. It doesn’t matter if you cross-examine them, if you expose them, they don’t answer. In the beginning I was much more angry than now. It’s not that I gave up, but I don’t think we’ll make it.

P Has it been bent?

R Yes, and not so long ago. You know they deny you, and you save it for the next time you know where they’re going.

P Sometimes you can see everything in the sound of the radio. Editorialized with both voice and word.

R Language is the tool we have on the radio for everything. For editorial preparation and above all for conveying emotions. It’s the only option you have. And I do nothing to ease my feelings. Neither in work nor in life. For example, right now I’m mad at the call I received. That’s why I hung up early. I count to a hundred.

P And silence, what’s the use?

R For me, silence is the emotion on the radio. Radio is very, very emotional. Much more than television, and someone who has been on television for many years will tell you that. I’ve never liked people who cry or throw up on air, but in this time of the pandemic, it’s been very, very difficult not to throw up. That, yes, sometimes you exit the program like you’ve been hit by a truck.

P Do you feel pressured by viewership data?

R Yes, so much so that I left television for it. I didn’t want to live under the mandate of the audience and at a certain moment I saw myself shaping the rundown according to it and not according to my journalistic criteria. On the radio, of course, you accept that, but you can also say no. I think we do honest, rigorous radio, we don’t shout. I just know how to do it, and if one day someone thinks you have to do other things to get more viewers, then I’ll do the same as on TV: I’ll leave.

P And does the competition influence you?

R I never ignore them. I’m always looking at what they’re doing and when I see there’s something that’s working for them I think. Why? There will be things that don’t interest me and there they are, but there will be others that I can learn from.

P How loud are the critics?

R The insult. The extreme right of Vox, calling me red, activist and stuff like that, zero. The criticism, the insults in the networks, no. I only engage in discussions with the people I love, and when people insult me, I don’t give a damn. Criticizing people I consider authoritative influences me and most of all it pisses me off, I get angry at myself for never wanting to do anything wrong.

P Is it bad to lose?

R I’m hyper-competitive and hyper-ambitious. But that doesn’t have to be negative. I want to be the best at everything I do, at everything.

P Also in Pilates?

R Likewise. And when I stop doing things, I want to be the best at doing nothing. If I do something, I do it. If not, I don’t wear it. But if I do, then I want to be the best.

P Admit me one mistake

R hmm I am so good… [ríe]

P an imperfection.

R I’m too obsessed with work and this has sometimes prevented me from enjoying other things and putting my personal life on hold and keeping it in the background.

P For example, do you long for spending more time with your daughter?

R I left my daughter when she was three years old, that word is so strong that sometimes I had to hear it and I came to Madrid to work and she stayed in Barcelona and we saw each other at the weekend seen. Sometimes I think about what life would have been like if I had done something different and I come to the conclusion that I wouldn’t have been as happy and probably neither would my family. We spent the confinement together and she, teleworking from home, picked up the bill for all the years I was absent mom, for all the times I wasn’t at school, at the carnival. It was wonderful.

P He has worked in media in front of and behind the screen for almost 40 years. Have you ever faced awkward situations because you are a woman?

R Yes, I started very young and back then a young woman was the same target for certain politicians, sources, bosses and colleagues. Of course I have experienced unpleasant situations. They always think that they can charm you more easily than men, that they can fuck you even more crookedly than they can.

P She is the only woman who hosts a morning radio show in the Pure and Hard Information Department. Do you think there is a gender bias in this flick?

R No, if there is bias, it is ideological. We’ve heard progressive women say things I never thought they could say. It makes me very angry to resume debates that we had already overcome and which I thought we could only move forward on. The other day I started the 8 o’clock editorial by saying: Let’s not take any law in general and women in particular for granted, the way things are going in this country with the rise of the far right. I don’t hide my anger there. Never.

“TODAY FOR TODAY” AND TOMORROW

Àngels Barceló (Barcelona, ​​​​58 years old) has been “testing” himself in front of the audience every day since he was 20, when he started presenting a news program on television in Catalonia, without even having completed his journalism studies. Since then she has been “tied” to the table of presenting and directing TV and radio programs, but has also accompanied national and international crises, which is what she enjoys most about the job. He admits that the worst news he had to deliver live was the death of his colleague and friend José Couso in Iraq, and the best, the end of ETA’s terrorist attacks. In autumn 2019 he took over the management of “Hoy por Hoy”, the big morning program of Cadena SER. Shortly thereafter, the pandemic broke out and all the hecatombs that followed it. Only now, he admits, is he beginning the program he dreamed of.

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