Christmas 1968: RTP's second channel goes on air in Lisbon

On Christmas Day 1968, a Wednesday, a new transmitter came on at Monsanto, the wooded hill on the western edge of Lisbon. RTP's engineers had added 20 metres to the station's steel tower and strengthened it to carry another seven tonnes of aerials. The new set sent out a second television programme on UHF channel 25, with an output of 10 kilowatts.2 sources2 sources

Few households could see it. The signal covered only the area served by Monsanto, and viewers needed a set and an aerial that could receive UHF. Those who could tuned in to the new programme from studios in Lumiar, in the north of the city, where RTP had squeezed in a small studio of 38 square metres with two cameras and a new continuity control room.1 source1 source

On the opening night the engineer Matos Correia, one of RTP's two deputy directors-general, explained to the camera what the new programme was for.1 source1 source

That December RTP was also showing the best of the Mundovisão pictures of Apollo 8, relayed worldwide by satellite. The spacecraft had been launched on 21 December and was orbiting the Moon by Christmas Eve. Portuguese viewers had another reason to watch the news: three months earlier, they had seen on RTP the President of the Republic dismiss António de Oliveira Salazar and swear in Marcelo Caetano.2 sources2 sources

Portugal was ruled by the Estado Novo, the authoritarian regime Salazar had built in the early 1930s. There were no free elections and the press was censored. Television arrived late and stayed in a single company's hands for 35 years.3 sources3 sources

On 15 December 1955 the government set up RTP, Radiotelevisão Portuguesa, as a limited company with a capital of 60,000 contos, split between the state, the private radio stations and private shareholders. Its concession contract, signed on 16 January 1956, was signed for the government by Marcelo Caetano, then Minister of the Presidency.2 sources2 sources

The first pictures went out at 9.30 pm on 4 September 1956 from the Feira Popular, the fun fair the newspaper O Século ran in the Palhavã park, where the Gulbenkian Foundation stands today. A 50-metre mast and a prefabricated pavilion with a partly glass-walled studio stood beside the shooting galleries, and more than 20 sets around the fair showed the result. The trials ran until 30 September, every day except Wednesday.2 sources2 sources

Regular broadcasting began at 9.30 pm on 7 March 1957 from the Lumiar studios, through a small 1-kilowatt transmitter installed provisionally in a navy building at Monsanto. The comic Raul Solnado was paid 1,000 escudos to appear on that first night. The Telejornal, the main news, followed on 18 October 1959.3 sources3 sources

The first transmitters were placed to reach Lisbon, Coimbra and Porto. The Monsanto and Lousã stations entered service on 23 November 1957 and Monte da Virgem, across the river from Porto, on 31 December. Montejunto followed in March 1958 and the Fóia relay, high in the Algarve's Serra de Monchique, in April, completing the first phase. Those four main stations covered 44 per cent of the mainland's area and 58 per cent of its people. Smaller relays then filled in the gaps, region by region.4 sources4 sources

By 1964 the signal covered 57.6 per cent of the country's area and 71.5 per cent of its population. By 1968 RTP put its potential audience at about seven million, more than 90 per cent of the population. Every set had to be registered and pay a licence fee, introduced on 1 January 1958.4 sources4 sources

Registered sets were far fewer than viewers. At the end of 1968 there were 305,623, with about 3,000 more registered each month, yet RTP estimated that about a million people watched each day. The media historian Francisco Rui Cádima calls the link between registered sets and audience extremely loose. Sets were watched in public too: for the 1956 trials RTP had placed them in shop windows, cafés and recreational clubs across Lisbon.4 sources4 sources

Salazar never took to the medium. RTP staff who recorded him said he confessed his ignorance of the machines, and Cádima writes that he left the stage without ever having used television assertively to promote himself, or even the regime. RTP's own chronology dates his first live televised speech to June 1958, given at the headquarters of the single party, the União Nacional.2 sources2 sources

The news was controlled all the same. Cádima finds that under Salazar the Telejornal kept to the official agenda and protocol, left out the empire and the colonies, and censored Humberto Delgado's opposition campaign in the 1958 presidential election. After the colonial war began in Angola in 1961, its editorials turned openly militant.1 source1 source

Film from Africa reached the Lumiar editing rooms under tightening censorship. After the failed Beja revolt at the turn of 1962, a confidential circular from the armed forces' public information service, dated 10 January, ruled that reports, films and photographs of the forces overseas could be shown only after military censorship.1 source1 source

In 1968, according to Vasco Hogan Teves, who ran RTP's news from 1969 and later wrote its history, the censors went easy on the Telejornal's scripts, already filtered through the news agencies, and hard on the pictures. Almost no images of the Paris student revolt of May or the Soviet invasion of Prague in August reached the screen.1 source1 source

Caetano had always seen television differently. He was on screen as early as 5 June 1957, three months after regular broadcasting began, speaking for nine minutes on ten years of the Marshall Plan. As head of government he made RTP an open instrument of his politics, and Cádima concludes that its news was more plainly used for propaganda under Caetano than under Salazar.3 sources3 sources

On 8 January 1969, two weeks after the second channel opened, Caetano gave the first of his Conversas em Família on RTP and radio. In his memoir he said he wanted to set out to the country, “in plain and clear language”, the ideas that guided him, the facts that constrained him and the reasons for his decisions. Ramiro Valadão, who became RTP's chairman in April 1969, later claimed the idea as his own.4 sources4 sources

Caetano gave 16 of these talks before his fall in 1974, by Teves's count. They looked like openness, but the historian Ana Cabrera, quoted in a 2022 study, points out that the regime's whole apparatus of repression carried on until April 1974. The same mix showed in entertainment. Zip-Zip, the talk show Raul Solnado, Carlos Cruz and Fialho Gouveia first broadcast on 26 May 1969, was a hit and a headache for the censors.4 sources4 sources

RTP had studied a second programme through 1967. Its board's report for that year said a second chain of transmitters would be needed, working on UHF, the ultra-high frequencies, with a basic network already defined at the Stockholm conference of 1961. The report for 1968 gave the reason: the VHF bands used by the first programme were crowded, and in some seasons signals from the rest of Europe and North Africa interfered with reception.1 source1 source

Matos Correia's promise of choice took a long time to arrive. The experimental broadcasts leaned on videotaped repeats of the first programme's studio shows, with a few filmed series shown for the first time. Viewers learned to look on the second channel for what they had missed on the first, and critics complained that there was still no real alternative at the same hour.1 source1 source

The new channel also changed how programmes were vetted inside RTP. With it in service, the board replaced its old reading committee and film-selection department with a Programme Appraisal Service, which read outside proposals and previewed films and series before the programme director made his choice.1 source1 source

Money was the brake. In May 1970 Valadão said the second channel cost RTP 5,000 contos a year in programmes alone, and that independent programming would need advertising to pay for it. From February 1971 the company that sold the first programme's advertising slots sold the second's as well.1 source1 source

When the Armed Forces Movement (MFA) overthrew the regime on 25 April 1974, it spoke first through the radio. At 4.26 am the journalist Joaquim Furtado read its first communiqué on Rádio Clube Português. Shortly after 3 am a unit from the army's Practical School of Administration had occupied the RTP studios at Lumiar without a fight.2 sources2 sources

The soldiers had forgotten Monsanto. RTP's security officer, Captain Eduardo Alarcão, went to the transmitter and took it off the air by removing one of its valves, which the porter hid in the guard dog's kennel. At 12.45 pm the lunchtime programme came on from the Porto studios instead, with an episode of the American series Daktari, another filmed series and slides of the city, until commandos from Lamego took the Monte da Virgem station at about 3 pm.1 source1 source

Staff at Monsanto finally switched their circuits over to Lumiar. At 6.41 pm the announcer Fernando Balsinha appeared on screens across the country: from that moment, he said, the MFA controlled RTP's entire transmitter network. Earlier the soldiers holding the studios had refused to let a crew out, but at about 4 pm two RTP cameramen, João Rocha and José Manuel Tudela, had got their cameras into the streets. They reached the Carmo barracks in time to film Caetano's surrender.2 sources2 sources

The broadcast ran on past midnight, with classical music, Michel Giacometti's films of rural work songs and repeated news bulletins. At 1.23 am on 26 April Fialho Gouveia introduced the officers of the Junta of National Salvation, and General António de Spínola read their proclamation to the country. Balsinha closed the transmission at 1.57 am.2 sources2 sources

In May 1974 RTP's concession was suspended and the government took over the service. A decree of 2 December 1975 nationalised the private shareholdings and turned the company into Radiotelevisão Portuguesa, EP, a public enterprise.2 sources2 sources

The second channel became a real alternative only in 1978. From 16 October that year it planned its own schedule in open competition with the first, under the film director Fernando Lopes, an RTP veteran back after 14 years away. RTP's historian calls it the event of the year. The second channel then reached 40 per cent of the mainland, against 82 per cent for the first.1 source1 source

Colour came next. RTP tested it during the three elections of 1976, and regular colour broadcasting began on 7 March 1980, the 23rd anniversary of the first regular broadcast, with the Festival RTP da Canção live from Lisbon's São Luís municipal theatre. José Cid won with “Um grande, grande amor”.2 sources2 sources

The state monopoly ended after the constitutional revision of 1989 opened television to private companies. SIC began broadcasting on 6 October 1992 and TVI, linked to Catholic institutions and promising programming inspired by “Christian humanism”, on 20 February 1993. Portugal was then the European country that watched most television: 3 hours and 44 minutes a day per person in 1990.3 sources3 sources

Competition pushed the two public channels apart. RTP1 took a more commercial line, while the second deepened its role as a cultural complement for what Cádima calls “qualified minorities”. Under an agreement signed by RTP, SIC and TVI in August 2003, the second channel kept its ban on commercial advertising and could carry only sponsorship credits of up to five seconds.2 sources2 sources

Its audience is small. In 2024 RTP2 had a 1 per cent share and an average of 19,700 viewers, against 11.4 per cent and 234,100 for RTP1, according to Mediamonitor/GfK data analysed by Dentsu for ECO's media site +M.1 source1 source