‘Maybe your story is not different from mine’: Memory, history and progress in the Galician series Libro de familia

Television is a privileged conduit for current events, for an unstoppable flow of live news, but it is also a suitable place to reflect on the past and to build a certain position towards history. In the last decade, there has been a revival of historical fiction in European television that has revealed a nostalgic approach to collective memory. Television series propose a review of the twentieth century’s official European history, but from the everyman perspective. The Galician public channel Televisión de Galicia (TVG) aired Libro de familia (José María Besteiro) in 2005 for the first time, and the audience quickly ensured its place in the schedule for the following seven years due to personal identification with the protagonists of the series. The success of this portrait of a rural family in Galicia during the 1960s raises some issues related to collective memory, official history and the ideology implicit in a fictional portrait of the past.