Antonio Mercero - Virtual museum

This can be considered as Mercero’s first television success. The plot was set around life in a perfect town where everybody lives according to Spain’s fundamental laws. Apart from directing the work, he also acted in it. He left the job a year later prompted by the controversies and ideological conflicts with the Franco-supporting apparatus. In fact, it seems that the idea to make the series came from the self-same Vice-President under Franco, Luis Carrero Blanco, wishing to vaunt the “positive and splendid side” of Spain’s fundamental laws.

He was offered the chance to direct the series when he was solely occupied making documentaries and, realising that those works didn’t earn him enough to live on, he accepted. More than once he admitted that he thought he would earn a lot of money if he worked as both the director and the actor.

Mercero didn’t last long as director of the project. In episode 13 he received two orders from Spanish public television: on the hand he was told that the law made it impossible for him to hold the jobs of director, scriptwriter and actor, and that they had to substitute him in his part as the priest. On the other, he was forced to replace the actor Luis Barbero (in the part of the mayor) for a “younger and more handsome” man. The Franco authorities wanted to project the idea of a perfect Spain, a combination of modernity and tradition.

Actors: Antonio Mercero, Emilio Rodríguez, Fernando Cebrián, Francisco Vidal, María Nevado

Length: 50 minutes