Goodbye to Chicho Ibáñez Serrador, a genius who scared, entertained and made the public on the small and big screen think

At the age of 83, the man who contributed to popularizing horror and fantasy films and revolutionizing television in Spain with formats such as the legendary 'One, Two, Three... answer again' or 'Let's talk about sex' has died.

Narciso (“Chicho”) Ibáñez Serrador died this Friday in Madrid at the age of 83 after being urgently admitted to a hospital.

The legendary director and director suffered from a degenerative disease that forced him to be in a wheelchair for several years.

Narciso Ibáñez Serrador (1935, Montevideo, Uruguay) was the only son of the acting couple Narciso Ibáñez Menta and Pepita Serrador. Raised between tours and stages, due to an illness he suffered as a child he became an avid reader and developed his intellectual vocation.

In the 1950s, already in Spain, he worked as an actor in his mother's theater company and, shortly after, he moved into theater direction. In 1957 he returned to Argentina and, together with his father, began a successful collaboration in theater, radio and television. Ibáñez Serrador became a renowned professional as an actor, director and scriptwriter on Argentine television, often signing his texts with the pseudonym Luis Peñafiel.

With theater as his origins, he discovered that directing and writing attracted him more than acting, becoming what he called "author who directs" or "author who performs."

He arrived in Spain in 1963, with tapes of his work in Argentina that he presented on Spanish Television, to which he transferred everything he had learned in America, revolutionizing and modernizing television in the sixties in our country with series such as Tomorrow it may be true o The history of Saint Michel, but especially with Stories to keep you from sleeping (1966). Added to these are the titles for the small screen The Last Clock, The Asphalt, Stories of Frivolity y The television (1974). Specialized in literary adaptations and biographies of famous people, especially in his Argentine period, however, it was his science fiction and horror stories that impacted the public the most.

He also cultivated this genre in cinema, giving rise to emblematic Spanish fantasy and horror titles: The residence (1969) y Who can kill a child? (1976), of which he was scriptwriter and director.

His hallmark also included humor, with the previous presentations he made in Stories to keep you from sleeping or in the cycles of My favorite terrors, to which he added a touch of irony and comedy. In the career of this popularizer of the classics of the genre, radio novels and theatrical works also appear. Approved in chastity, The little hole y The eagle and the fog.

He founded the production company Prointel in 1970 to develop his own productions in film, television, theater and advertising, among which are the legendary program One two, three, answer again..., one of the longest-running and internationally exported television formats; Let's talk about sex (which for the first time addressed sex without taboos on television), The traffic light o Waku Waku.

The career of the “shy” man who scared, amused and made the public think was recognized with the National Television Award in 2010, the Master of Fantastic Award at the Nocturna Festival, the Ondas Award for Best Program for Hablemos de Sex, the Antena de Oro awards, the Iris Award and the Feroz de Honor Award, among other awards, to which the Goya of Honor was recently added at the latest edition of the Film Academy Awards.