Iker Jimenez and Carmen Porter met at the Faculty of Information Sciences in Madrid, married in 1994 and have worked together nearly every day since. At the television festival in Vitoria he delivered the line that is worth more than an entire interview: "Look what a good husband I am!"

Said as a joke, of course. But around that joke stand more than thirty years of a marriage in which the two of them are simultaneously a couple and work colleagues. That is a combination that usually does not survive three years, let alone thirty.

"Horizonte" runs Monday to Friday, "Cuarto Milenio" on Sundays. Which means an unfinished argument at home cannot stay unfinished, because tomorrow you are sitting in front of the same camera again. Few marriages operate on such a short deadline for making up.

They have a daughter, Alma, aged fourteen, who they say is already showing an interest in journalism. For a family that lives off television, that is both a compliment and a warning.

What the whole story lacks is a recipe. When they are asked about the key to the marriage, the answer is not a formula but a line tossed out to a hall to break the silence. Perhaps that is the whole answer: thirty years are not explained, they are lived one day at a time, and then someone asks you to sum them up in a single sentence.