El Foraster is an experienced and successful show on TV3, a Catalan version of the old A-Land in the backpack, with the actor Quim Masferrer in place of José Antonio Labordeta. Every Monday Masferrer visits a town and spends two days talking to all the neighbors he meets. With all his stories he composes a monologue, which he recites to his compatriots and which spins the narrative. This week he was in Ulldemolins, Tarragona, and towards the middle of the chapter the stranger met one of the 400 residents, Francisca Masip, la Cisqueta, 95 years old. With a poise and eloquence worthy of Marcus Aurelius, Masip broke the banal, gentle and condescending tone of the program by talking about what one cannot talk about: death.
In the cities Masferrer visits, the population pyramid is reversed. That means they’re full of nonagenarians. The actor tends to give them that infantile paternalism with which the world usually treats older people. He tells them they are great kids and celebrates every gesture as if it were an achievement, just as one would applaud a child’s idea. But Cisqueta was philosophical, saying that she was already waiting for death, that she had lived long and well and that she wished he would visit her before the illness.
The presenter’s humorous, uncomfortable and exaggerated reaction – although presented as gratitude and admiration for Masip’s stoicism – goes a long way to explaining why death remains taboo. Television only knows how to approach it from the point of morbidity, as it showed us in the program Mañaneros with the images of the corpse of Álvaro Prieto, but it remains excessive and naked in the face of cheerful, thoughtful, wise and eloquent speeches that acknowledge and accept mortality. And that’s an interesting problem in an aging Europe where the numbers are increasing.
You can follow EL PAÍS Television on X or sign up here to receive our weekly newsletter.
Get the TV newsletter
All the latest news from broadcasters and platforms, with interviews, news and analyses, as well as recommendations and reviews from our journalists
LOG IN
Subscribe to continue reading
Read without limits
_