Mario Picazo (Colorado, United States) has spent his 58 years between Spain and the United States. And, without having planned it, also between academic life and communication. Three decades ago he became one of the most famous meteorologists in Spain, when he began to appear on Telecinco news. Since a few weeks ago, he has returned to Mediaset as presenter of the magazine Time to time in the afternoons on Cuatro.
The programme, produced in collaboration with Unicorn Content, explains meteorological phenomena and climate change from a modern set full of technical and visual resources. Picazo and Verónica Dulanto —head of the current affairs area— explain to the viewer concepts related to science and care for the planet, health, well-being, food and sport. “Weather on television can no longer be limited to telling the weather tomorrow. We have to explain why it is like this and how the climate is changing. Dissemination takes over what was once simple information,” the meteorologist explained at the beginning of May from the studio where he broadcasts live. Time to time“Even though everyone has a weather forecast app on their mobile phone, viewers prefer to have a person tell them about it, they are looking for added value,” he says.
That’s why he and Dulanto surround themselves with collaborators of all kinds. Chef Begoña Rodrigo, chemist Ricardo Díaz, environmental activist Olivia Mandle, trainer Crys Dyaz, scientist Alfredo Corell, doctor David Callejo, science journalist América Valenzuela and topic analyst and blogger Alfred López (@curiosisimo_) broaden the horizons of this evening magazine.
The cold weather in Madrid and in a good part of Spain in the middle of spring makes formats of this type on television even more necessary, to explain the new climatic normality. “It has been an atypical May in Spain, due to the incursion of cold air while in the north of Europe it has reached 30 degrees. We have increasingly swings of hotter and colder weather,” says Picazo. He admits that, 30 years after making his debut on screen, he is learning like never before to make television with a format that forces him to take a more leading role than in his previous projects.
On the contents to be discussed in Time to timethe meteorologist warns that the program is still in the testing phase. “We are still finding the formula that works best, in a particularly complicated time slot. But the idea is to address issues that are close and friendly, so that the viewer of that time of the afternoon can absorb them calmly. And where live information predominates, which is the trademark of the house,” he comments. His intention is to always be attentive to current events and spend a lot of time on the street, through connections with reporters that give more dynamism, to differentiate itself from other informative spaces such as Here the Earth (The 1).
Return to Mediaset
11 years ago, Picazo left Paolo Vasile’s Mediaset with some controversy, when he publicly regretted that one of the group’s programs, What am I doing here?will imitate its format Extreme weather, which he himself recorded for TVE after Mediaset rejected it. Although his return to Mediaset coincides with Vasile’s departure, he assures that they could have coexisted without any problem in this new stage. “I don’t know what happened then. It’s true that I was shocked that such a formula appeared after having declined my proposal. But I understand that these are business decisions and I don’t take it personally,” he says.
Although he was always interested in scientific dissemination, Mario Picazo never imagined that he would be able to do so on such a large scale. As a child, he recalls, he was so shy that when he told his parents that he was going to teach at the university, they asked him in surprise: “Are you going to speak in front of people?” When they later found out that he was going to appear on TV, they were even more surprised.
In the mid-nineties, Picazo was working in a laboratory in Bilbao, monitoring air pollution at a thermal power station. One summer, he received a call from the then head of international news at Telecinco, whom he knew from studying together in Los Angeles. “He told me that Telecinco was looking for a meteorologist to give the weather, but a real one (which at that time was not common in the field),” he recalls. “As it was mid-August, only two people showed up to do the tests and they hired me,” he says. “Imagine the idea I had of doing television that I came to do the camera test in a checked jacket. I had been a university professor and I knew I could communicate, but I had never appeared on screen. It was very difficult for me. At first I was like a flan. The weather report was recorded and I had to repeat it about 12 times,” he confesses.
In 2007, he was on the verge of signing for Televisión Española as a replacement for José Antonio Maldonado. “For a meteorologist, TVE has always been the reference. But at Mediaset I was doing more and more things. When I told Paolo Vasile about the offer I had received, he suggested another format that interested me, Clever (a competition by García that he presented with Emma García). And that tipped the balance.”
It was during this time that Picazo developed his role as a presenter. He decided to try a format that he had rejected several times, Survivors“It was an escape valve from the daily work I did in news. I focused on the physical evidence from the island and, when a script appeared in which it said that Pepito had fought with someone, I asked them to change it so that those issues could be dealt with from the set. If I had been involved in other aspects, I think that the image needed to be a face of news would have been somewhat damaged.”
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