Francisco Nicholson, the revue writer who gave Portugal its own telenovela

On the morning of 12 April 2016, António Calvário was having breakfast in a café near his home, watching a programme on the television, when a line of text began to run along the bottom of the screen. Francisco Nicholson had died. The two men had met on a revue stage in 1963, and the next year Calvário had sung Nicholson's words to the whole country.1 source1 source

Nicholson was 77. He had been ill for years after liver transplant surgery; his friend Herman José, the comedian, said he had survived two. The first news agency reports said he died at home, but by the evening Diário de Notícias reported that he had died at the Curry Cabral hospital, where he had been admitted the previous Thursday.2 sources2 sources

The obituaries listed more than fifty years of work as actor, revue author, director, lyricist and television writer. The President, Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa, spoke of a friend and of “a fighter for democracy”. Diário de Notícias put one title first: Vila Faia, the first Portuguese telenovela, which RTP began showing in May 1982, five years after a Brazilian soap opera had held the country in front of its television sets every weeknight.3 sources3 sources

Francisco António de Vasconcelos Nicholson was born in Lisbon on 26 June 1938. His surname came from English ancestors on his father's side. That side of the family was also noble, and in interviews he liked to recall that it linked him to the Count of Farrobo and the Baron of Quintela.2 sources2 sources

He started acting at 14 at the Liceu Camões, a Lisbon secondary school, under the poet and director António Manuel Couto Viana, who took him into the theatre group of the Mocidade Portuguesa, the regime's youth movement. His classmate Rui Mendes, later a well-known actor, started there too. His family opposed a stage career, so he spent three years in the merchant navy before short spells of training at the National Conservatory in Lisbon and in Paris.2 sources2 sources

Back in Lisbon he made his professional debut with O Gerifalto, Couto Viana's children's theatre company. Then came comedy and revue at the ABC, Variedades, Monumental and Villaret theatres, as actor and director. In 1963, in the ABC revue Chapéu Alto, he met Calvário, a young singer already voted “King of the Radio” by magazine readers. They toured the country together and, Calvário remembered, went to every party going after the show.3 sources3 sources

Revue lived with the censor. Under the Estado Novo, the dictatorship that ruled Portugal until 25 April 1974, every number had to go to the Secretariado Nacional de Informação at the Palácio Foz. Texts came back with words and lines struck out, were rewritten and sent again while rehearsals went on, and before opening night a group of censors, church representatives among them, watched a dress rehearsal. Freire Costa remembers them coming back unannounced during the run, to sit in what theatres called the authorities' box.2 sources2 sources

In 1964 RTP, the state television service that had been on the air since 1957, needed a song for the Eurovision Song Contest. On 2 February it staged the Grande Prémio TV da Canção Portuguesa in a studio it had just rented from the Tóbis film company at Lumiar. A jury had chosen 12 songs from 127 entries, six singers sang two each, and juries in the district capitals voted by telephone.2 sources2 sources

The winner was “Oração” (Prayer), with music by João Nobre and words by Francisco Nicholson and Rogério Bracinha, sung by Calvário. RTP counts the contest as the first Festival RTP da Canção, and Calvário as its first winner; a 2024 Diário de Notícias profile calls it the festival's forerunner.3 sources3 sources

In Copenhagen on 21 March 1964, Portugal's first Eurovision entry scored no points. It shared last place, 13th, with West Germany, Switzerland and Yugoslavia. The Diário de Notícias profile says the song was met with whistles and boos aimed at Salazar's regime, not at the singer. Teves, RTP's historian, writes that there is no record of the audience reacting either way.3 sources3 sources

The same year Nicholson and the actor Armando Cortez created Riso e Ritmo (Laughter and Rhythm) for RTP: comedy sketches between musical numbers. It led to a New Year's Eve special that made famous the line “Já é uma hora? Que grande banquete!” (“One o'clock already? What a feast!”). RTP's own history records the show still on the air in 1969, though by then its quality and time slot were irregular.2 sources2 sources

The military coup of 25 April 1974 ended the dictatorship and, with it, the censorship of the stage. Within months Nicholson, the set designer Mário Alberto and the choreographer Fernando Lima were among the founders of the Ádóque, a theatre workers' cooperative. It was self-managed, which Luciano Reis, its historian, says was a first for musical theatre in Portugal. It played in a demountable theatre in the Largo do Martim Moniz that had belonged to the company of Rafael Oliveira.3 sources3 sources

It opened in September 1974 with Pides na Grelha (roughly, “PIDE men on the grill”), a revue by Nicholson, Edgar Gonsalves Preto and Mário Alberto. The PIDE was the dictatorship's political police. Diário de Notícias called the Ádóque a company of the left, set against the conservative line of Parque Mayer; another of its revues was A CIA dos Cardeais.4 sources4 sources

By Reis's count the Ádóque staged 21 shows, seen by more than 1.2 million people in Lisbon and more than 70 other towns, and its songs filled 15 records, before it closed in 1982. Actors such as Virgílio Castelo and Maria Vieira started there.1 source1 source

In 1977 Portugal was three years out of its revolution. The first constitutional government, elected in 1976, faced strikes, party feuds and IMF austerity packages, and there were only two television channels, both run by RTP. On the evening of 16 May, RTP broadcast a “Brazilian night” from the Hotel Ritz in Lisbon: an interview with the novelist Jorge Amado, songs by Vinicius de Moraes and Toquinho, and the first episode of Gabriela, Cravo e Canela, introduced by the comedian Raul Solnado.3 sources3 sources

TV Globo had made it in 1975, for its tenth anniversary, from Amado's 1958 novel about the cocoa town of Ilhéus in 1925. Carlos Cruz, briefly RTP's director of programmes, had beaten Globo down from 500 to 300 dollars an episode. RTP showed it five nights a week from about 8.35 pm, and no programme had held the same prime-time slot every weeknight before.3 sources3 sources

Vasco Hogan Teves, RTP's historian, reckons that at least four million people followed it for six months. Sets were scarce, about 150 for every 1,000 inhabitants, so people watched in cafés, neighbourhood clubs and residents' associations. The media historian Isabel Ferin Cunha points out that this made Gabriela, unusually for a telenovela, a programme followed mainly by men, because the evening café was a male routine while women cooked and cleared up at home.3 sources3 sources

Its phrases passed into everyday Portuguese, from Gabriela's “sapato não!” to Colonel Ramiro Bastos's “ô, xente!”. Young women copied Malvina's short hair and fringe, and when the actors who played Malvina and Tonico Bastos flew in that November, hundreds of people met them at Portela airport. Expresso reported that Álvaro Cunhal, leader of the Communist Party, arrived late at RTP's Lumiar studios for a programme because he had stayed to see the end of an episode.2 sources2 sources

The last episode, the 130th, went out on Wednesday 16 November 1977. That day the Diário de Lisboa protested on its front page that “they took 30 episodes away from Gabriela”, asking why a serial shown in full under Brazil's dictatorship had been cut in democratic Portugal. The figure rested on RTP's early announcement of 160 episodes, which RTP called a slip; Rodrigues counts 135 in Globo's original.3 sources3 sources

RTP repeated Gabriela from August 1977 to February 1978, partly overlapping the first run, and showed it again, in colour, on its second channel in 1983.3 sources3 sources

After Gabriela, Brazilian telenovelas never left Portuguese screens. Cunha counts about 37 on RTP's two channels in the 1980s, and RTP built its evenings around them: Brazilian telenovela, news, Brazilian telenovela. As early as February 1981 a Diário de Notícias headline asked the obvious question: “And the Portuguese telenovela?”1 source1 source

The answer came from outside RTP. The production company EDIPIM, run by Thilo Krasmann and Victor Mamede, was invited to make one, though it had no studio. They found an unfinished industrial shed at Abrunheira, near Sintra, and fitted out 1,000 square metres. The studio's cost was put at around 30,000 contos, or 30 million escudos, which Teves suspects was an underestimate.1 source1 source

RTP lent a director, Nuno Teixeira, and video equipment. Krasmann and Teixeira went to Globo's studios in Brazil to see how it was done, and Teixeira later called the difference abysmal.1 source1 source

The story was first called João Gudunha, after its hero (Observador spells the name Godunha). Nicolau Breyner, who would play him and direct the actors, and Krasmann passed the idea to Francisco Nicholson and João Alves da Costa, who developed it and wrote the dialogue; the writer Odete de Saint-Maurice had tried first and given up. Observador's obituary of Breyner gives a shorter version: he wrote it with Krasmann and Nicholson.2 sources2 sources

Breyner gave a six-week acting course to a cast that included newcomers found at auditions, among them Luís Esparteiro and Nuno Homem de Sá.1 source1 source

The plot turned on Marques Vila, a respected wine firm. Gudunha was a lonely former boxer who had killed a rival in the ring, spent 14 years in Africa and came home to drive the firm's lorries, and he fell for Mariette, a prostitute played by Margarida Carpinteiro. Ruy de Carvalho, Mariana Rey Monteiro and Varela Silva were in the cast, and Nicholson played a policeman.3 sources3 sources

Vila Faia began on RTP-1 on 10 May 1982. Its 100 episodes ran for almost five months, against four Brazilian telenovelas that year. At one point 30 different sets stood in the Abrunheira studio, and on good days the crew recorded 40 minutes, or two episodes. About 70 technicians and actors worked on it for nine months.2 sources2 sources

RTP's audience studies found that Vila Faia was its most watched programme from the first episode. The share of viewers who said they liked it rose from 71% after the first five episodes to 91% after 78. A separate survey asked viewers to compare it with the Brazilian telenovelas.1 source1 source

Teves thought it stayed the best Portuguese telenovela for many years. Cunha describes Vila Faia and the four that followed by 1988 as a pioneering cycle that copied Globo's model while looking for Portuguese themes and characters. Episodes were about 30 minutes, written day by day. The writers were used to the language of theatre or revue, she writes, and the actors moved as if they were on stage and could not forget the cameras.2 sources2 sources

Nicholson wrote the next one too. Origens began in early April 1983 and its 120 episodes ran, sometimes painfully in Teves's view, to the end of September, with Breyner again directing the actors and Teixeira directing. It aimed at a close portrait of the urban middle class, and it was said at the time that it had not made viewers forget Vila Faia. EDIPIM made no more telenovelas and turned to series instead.2 sources2 sources

RTP's monopoly ended when the private channels SIC and TVI went on air, on 6 October 1992 and 20 February 1993. In 1994 SIC signed an exclusive deal with Globo, which took 15% of its capital, and at times Globo's telenovelas on SIC took 85% of the audience. Experienced Brazilian professionals, almost all from Globo, came to work in Portugal, helping production companies such as NBP, which Breyner had founded and TVI later bought.2 sources2 sources

Nicholson kept writing for the screen, including Cinzas, Os Lobos, Ajuste de Contas, Ganância and O Olhar da Serpente, and was one of the founders, with Armando Cortez, Manuela Maria and Raul Solnado, of the Casa do Artista. From 1999, after its purchase by Media Capital, TVI built its evenings on Portuguese telenovelas and audiences moved with it, away from the Brazilian productions on SIC.2 sources2 sources

Vila Faia showed that a small Portuguese company could make a telenovela that viewers rated alongside Globo's. RTP remade it in 2008, with Albano Jerónimo as Gudunha, and in 2026 it was offering advertisers a weekday afternoon run of that remake, 120 episodes, under the line “in 1982 RTP launched the first novela made in Portugal”.3 sources3 sources

Nicholson also stayed with revue to the end, taking part in shows such as Piratada à Portuguesa!, Agarra, que é Honesto! and A Escuta que os Pariu! in his last decade. Herman José, whom he had first met in 1978 in a play with the revue star Ivone Silva, predicted that he would be remembered as a great author, much more than as an actor.1 source1 source

“Oração” is still Portugal's first Eurovision song. The country did not win the contest until 2017, 53 years after Calvário came home from Copenhagen without a point.2 sources2 sources