Even as late as 1966, the Catalan singer Joan Manuel Serrat pulled out of the Eurovision Song Contest after he was banned from singing part of the song ‘La, la, la’ in Catalan. His replacement, Massiel, sang the same song in Castilian Spanish and won the competition, beating Cliff Richard’s ‘Congratulations’ into second place. Franco had bought off the judges. By the time the dictator died in 1975, less than 5 per cent of books were published in Catalan; forty years earlier, almost a quarter had been.
