Joana Marques: “I don’t think about it much, but my father calls me and asks me not to talk about this or that when he detects a degree of madness”

Born in January 1986, in Lisbon. Her childhood was spent between her grandparents’ house, in Restelo, and the house where she lived with her parents and brother, in Linda-a-Velha.

He always studied in the Restelo area. The grandparents lived on what is now known as Embassy Avenue, each on their own side of the road – it was there that the parents met.

As a child, he performed in theaters with his brother. “He was in charge, wrote the script and I was always the secondary character, of course”, he recalls. They are 6 years apart and have very different tastes: “He is the serious side of the family”. “While I was listening to Spice Girls, he would lock himself in his room, in that complicated phase of adolescence, listening to Nick Cave”, he recalls.

At home there were too many rules, but at my grandparents’ house “there were no laws”. “I opened the pantry and could eat whatever I wanted. It was that exaggeration that grandparents allow and today we, parents, censor.” There wasn’t a day that went by that she didn’t throw tantrums whenever her parents picked her up to go home. “It was boring going back to the world of rules”, he says.

A slightly rebellious teenager, but perhaps because of the great discipline he had at home. “I was grounded for months” and he doesn’t forget one of them: “To learn (and do it well) I spent a month watching all the cinema classics”.

She has a degree in Communication Sciences from the Faculty of Social and Human Sciences at Universidade Nova de Lisboa, but the faculty has always been in the background. She never wanted to be a journalist and in the first year of her degree she quickly realized that she didn’t like the course. With no hope of her opening the Television and Cinema course, she took, in parallel, a scriptwriting course. “I knew I wanted to be a screenwriter.”

He started working in Fictitious Productions, moved to Canal Q and later to radio, where he did the mornings on Antena 3. Today he does the most listened to program in Portugal – Extremamente Nasagradável. “It’s the heir rubric ‘Highs and Lows’. The title comes from Inês Lopes Gonçalves. I was never good at it,” she confesses.

He does not consider what he does every day to be an “act of courage”. He believes that people’s hatred will not pass into “real life” and even devalues ​​his father’s warnings: “He sometimes calls me and asks me not to talk about that one anymore”, he says.

He has two children. They are also very different. The oldest loves fashion and wants to be a stylist, the youngest loves cars and is from Sporting, even though his father is from Benfica and his mother is from FC Porto. She brought to this podcast the first book she read as a child, ‘Uma Aventura’, and remembers the difference between generations: “When I was bored I read it, today kids have a lot of stimulation”.

Joana Marques is the guest of Geração 80, a podcast led by Francisco Pedro Balsemão.

Free and dreamy, the 80s in Portugal were marked by the consolidation of democracy and an opening to the world driven by membership of the EEC. These were years of great creativity, the impact of which still lasts today. Despite the mustaches, the wads and the perms, did the 80s give the world the best harvest ever? In this podcast, we give voice to a series of Portuguese people born in that brilliant decade, in a return to the future guided by Francisco Pedro Balsemão, born in 1980.