The First Latin American 'Telenovela'

Witness History

BBC

History, Personal Journals, Society & Culture

4.4 • 1.6K Ratings

🗓️ 16 December 2016

⏱️ 9 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Vida Alves starred in Latin America's first soap opera, or telenovela. 'Sua Vida Me Pertence' was broadcast in Brazil in December 1951. It kick-started a TV genre that has spread across the globe and is now worth hundreds of millions of dollars. Vida speaks to Mike Lanchin about her memories of making TV history.

Photo: Vida Alves and Walter Forster in a scene from 'Sua Vida Me Pertence', Brazil 1951 (Museu Pró-TV)

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello and welcome to the witness podcast with me Mike Lanchin and today I'm taking you back to December
0:05.3	1951 when the first telenovela or Latin American TV soap opera was broadcast in Brazil. It featured the first ever live kiss on Brazilian television,
0:17.0	and it pioneered a new TV genre now worth hundreds of millions of dollars around the globe. I didn't think it was a
0:34.0	more important.
0:40.0	I didn't think it was so important. I didn't think it was going to be so important.
0:42.0	I thought it would be something simple interesting beautiful but not of such
0:48.1	importance to me it was just a job. Brazilian TV star Vida Alves is now in her 80s, and though frail she still recalls with modesty and pride her part in
1:06.0	Brazil's TV revolution.
1:11.0	In the early 1950s Vida was a young actor in the city of Sao Paulo.
1:17.0	Brazil's first TV station, TV Tupi, had just been launched.
1:21.0	The first program was a kind of mixture of everything.
1:28.0	All the genres, all the programs, and that's where I went to work, luckily for me.
1:34.0	It was a television clear,
1:38.0	extremely basic. It was all very basic.
1:44.0	All the technical equipment had to be imported from the US, and all the programs were broadcast
1:50.5	from the studios live.
1:52.4	Maudo Alan Carr, writer and consultant on television and tellie novellas,
1:57.0	spoke to me from Rio de Janeiro.
1:59.0	Some of the big stores in the city put televisions in their windows so that people could watch
2:05.8	and see this new apparatus because it was something totally foreign for people, like from
2:11.2	another planet. Since the 1930s, American soap companies had been backing radio dramas, the famous soap operas, to help sell their products
2:25.2	to American housewives.
	...

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