On 18 July 1936, a large contingent of the Spanish armed forces rose in rebellion against the legally established government of the Spanish Republic. Something the rebels had conceived of as a military coup and which often occurred in 19th-century Spain, developed into a civil war, lasting for almost three years, until April 1939. The military Junta commanding the rebel military government promoted General Francisco Franco as commander-in-chief of the armed forces and Head of the State on 1 October 1936. Francisco Franco was known as the ‘Generalissimo’ or ‘Caudillo’ of Spain ‘by the grace of God’ in the dictatorship's rhetoric. He did not relinquish power until his death in 1975. The Francoist dictatorship lasted for 40 years, during which Spain underwent a series of changes. An essentially agricultural country with limited nationwide communications and a degree of illiteracy beyond European parameters became, above all during the second half of the 1960s, an emergent mass culture and consumer society of predominantly middle-class citizens. It was also the recipient of a continuous flux of millions of tourists, who spent their holidays on the Spanish beaches and merged their habits and idiosyncrasies with those of the Spanish people. One could say that Spain, during the last 10 years of Francisco Franco's life (1965–1975) was no doubt the first dictatorship in the world where its citizen's lack of freedom ran parallel to the initial creation of a mass-consumer society. During that particular period in time Televisión Española (TVE), the Spanish Public Television monopoly, became the principal cultural industry in Spain and the preferred leisure activity of the citizens. However, TVE was unique within the European context for decades as it was a hybrid station, the only state-owned network not financed by TV licensing or taxpayers, but through advertising profits. This article is divided into four sections, which outline the relationship the Spanish dictator maintained with television. The first section outlines Franco's encounters with the beginnings of television in Spain in the 1950s; the second reflects Franco's thoughts about television, above all in the 1960s; the third part focuses on television as one of the dictator's leisure activities, mostly in the 1970s, and the last section points to some of the iconographic problems Francisco Franco's television image underwent.