ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the broadcasting of a number of BBC 2’s Jazz 625 episodes and of Eurovision jazz content. The television service was controlled by the New State regime, which subjected broadcast news in particular to a system of strict censorship. However, when it came to cultural content, certain Radiotelevisão Portuguesa (RTP) producers managed to deliberately smuggle implicitly subversive material into their music programmes. Such was the case of Manuel Jorge Veloso, already a clandestine member of the Portuguese Communist Party. By means of his TV JAZZ series, he began to infiltrate references to extra-musical concerns, such as blackness, the civil rights movement and the powerful symbolic meaning of jazz in the US in the face of white supremacy. What is noteworthy is that he did this within a state-controlled television network during an ongoing colonial war in the Portuguese-African possessions.
