Image: Netflix
There are different ways of looking at Cable Girls or Las Chicas del Cable, a Spanish part-work we've just finished watching on Netflix.
First, that it's a gripping depiction of the years before and during the Spanish Civil War, starting at the end of the 1920s and stretching through the next decade.
Second, that this is a serious and worthy subject treated as pantomime, with absurd dialogue and even more absurd scenes of impossible derring-do and outrageous family conflict.
Third? Third of many possibilities actually. That Madrid and the events of the era are graphically portrayed and the cast, from the beauty, warmth and fiery natures of the younger stars (male and female if we're honest) to the almost unmitigated evil of the elderly anti-heroine, quite compelling.
Cable Girls may be all of those things and more. It may also be that the script is miles better than I suppose, but lost in translation.
Mme Salut has conversational Spanish but found the delivery too fast to avoid having to follow the sub-titles.
More accomplished Spanish speakers are warmly invited to convince me I'm wrong and that in its native form, the dialogue works perfectly. They'll have a little more trouble explaining away some of the comically inappropriate facial gestures.
But whichever assessment of the series is right, one conclusion defies challenge: that's 1,794 minutes - 30 hours! - that I will never get back. And I don't really mind.
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