Today the embarrassment of explaining Fawlty Towers to my Spanish friends, an internet outage, and the end of central Government control in Spain

 

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Day 87 Fake Spanish Waiters uncorrected transcript 

 

Wednesday and the Spanish Parliament has approved the Royal Decree for “new normality”. It starts in a very good place with central control being released and the regional Governments can go back to being in charge.

 

Well I say Wednesday, it is actually Thursday we had an Internet moment last night, every couple of months the internet falls over, we have a peculiar Internet system here, it uses a line of sight dish that sends and receives the internet from a transmitter and receiver site, last night it decided to be naughty and not work.

 

We found out after returning from our Covid19 shopping experience, now that we can both travel in the car we split the shopping so I get to enjoy the rubber glove, mask, steamed up glasses experience too.

 

Our client Ryan emailed to say he had not received the audio I sent him at midday.  He was right it still had not synced into the cloud even after 5 hours.

 

Then we could not turn the lights on through Alexa, she did that red spinning thing saying she couldn’t connect to the internet.  This is our fault for bringing northern European technology down to southern Spain and expecting it to work as well as it did in the UK.

 

Spain, does have good high speed internet in many of the cities, but out here on the coast it is not particularly fast or reliable.  Why am I banging on about the internet?  Because right now as many people as possible who can work from home should, that is the Spanish Government advice.

 

But it is going to require massive infrastructure improvements, more fibre optic availability and a much quicker and better way of being connected.  I remember when we first used to come to Spain twenty or so years ago, the electric grid network was equally unreliable, now there seems to be fewer power outages even in the big storm we had 18 months ago, the electricity stayed on.  So, Spain has come a long way in 20 years with the quality of the power network, now I think they need to think about the internet network in the same way.

 

A phone call from the Opticians about my glasses, in Spanish I picked out most of the words, but there I was having trouble with a word that sounded like mountains, she kept saying the mountains are wrong, or at least that is what is sounded like.

 

For the last 12 weeks I have been wearing a pair of specs that are held together with insulation tape, it makes me look a bit special needs, if I dare say that in this Little Britain p.c. world.

 

It turns out that the mountains, is the word Monturas, - the frames, so the bloody frames of my new glasses are broken on arrival, so the new glasses have been sent back to the factory… sigh!

 

Back to Little Britain and whilst I am not going to comment on the ‘black face’ characters of that show and ‘Come Fly with Me’ – I leave that up to my black friends, it really is their call, though I find characters like Precious Little funny, but uncomfortable watching all at the same time. She is what comedy writers would call a grotesque, a bit like Judy in Punch and Judy.

 

A few years ago when we were learning Spanish and helping our friends with their English the subject of comedy came up and what our favourite comedies were about.  I spoke to Maria about “Fawlty Towers” “Tell me,” she said “What is funny about an hotel,”

 

I said, “Well there is this character called Manuel, he is from Barcelona and is portrayed as a stupid idiot because he never understands what anyone is saying.”

 

“So, who is the Spanish actor who plays this Manuel,” she asked.  “Well he isn’t Spanish he is English and he, er well puts make-up on and a silly Spanish moustache and walks around with a vacant expression on his face.”

 

Suddenly she recognised the show, “This is cannot be right, we had this show many years ago and the waiter was a stupid Italian from Naples, not Spanish, ha you know how stupid Italians are,” she laughed.

 

Turns out she was right, when Fawlty Towers was shown on La Una, they dubbed all the characters into Spanish and made Manuel a waiter from Naples in Italy.  He was still Andrew Sachs an English Caucasian actor playing a Latino with a false moustache and fake suntan skin.

 

Finally yesterday, Wednesday we are sorting out selling our car, in Britain you fill in the little slip at the bottom of the V5 and exchange some money and job done.

 

It would appear in Spain it is a long complicated process which involves a trip to the main Trafico DGT office in the city of Granada, a great deal of form filing and there is TAX to pay on the sale, based on how new the car is.  There is an official list of the tax payable.  The Administrator who will be receiving a large fee for doing all this work has already said “Your car does not exist.”

 

I do feel that a car selling drama might be on the horizon, keep listening and subscribe to the Spanish Practices Podcast, in a few days’ time I will tell you the story of an event that I shall always regret for the rest of my life.