The 1991 game show that, according to a forum user, paid in 'eurofichas'

¡Ay, que calor!, the 1991 game show

In 1991, at ten o'clock at night, Telecinco aired a game show set on a boat: a captain, a co-host, and a bevy of hostesses. It was called ¡Ay, que calor! and was presented by Luis Cantero and Eva Pedraza, whom a forum user remembers at 56. The mechanics had no hidden depth: contestants answered questions and, depending on whether they got them right or wrong, one part or another of the set lost clothing. The format is back in the conversation now for what it portrays: a generalist television that no longer exists.

The Italian original, more brazen

The original was Italian, from 1990, and noticeably more brazen than the Spanish copy: the so-called 'chicas chin chin' wore tasseled pasties. Some claim that Telecinco belonged to Silvio Berlusconi at the time, so, according to that version, the Spanish schedule acted as a communicating vessel with the formats already working on the Italian businessman's television. What was seen here would be the domesticated version of a product designed for a different threshold of modesty.

Some remember watching it secretly: some of those who consumed it were minors and did so—so the story goes—under cover of night and with a certain premeditation, knowing it was not a program to boast about at school. The contrast with today's schedule, where that same content would be unthinkable in prime time on a generalist channel, is the stuff nostalgia is made of.

Prizes in 'eurofichas', according to a forum memory

The most striking unintentional detail of the show was, according to a participant, its currency: prizes were awarded in 'eurofichas', a unit that, according to that memory, the show did not bother to explain and that anticipated by name the European single currency years before it was called that. An exercise in unintentional foresight that today reads as pure archaeology.

The rest of the memory is about props: hostesses with curves without tattoos and permanent smiles, papier-mâché, and a casting nobody wants to remember. The next stop proposed in this review is Un día es un día, by Ángel Casas, on La 1. And there the analysis gets stuck: there is no clean way to measure how much of that was television and how much was simple merchandise with an expiration date.

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Data and context come from the open discussion about the program.