La Télé – French TV in the 1980s
One cold, wet evening during a recent school holiday, we suggested a movie-and-pizza evening to our 12-year-old granddaughter. We spent an hour scrolling through all the channels in addition to Netflix, Amazon Prime, and Apple TV, but every (suitable) movie was rejected or had already been seen. In the end we gave up and went out to eat the pizza we were going to order in. The old adage about the more channels there are, the less there is to see?
It’s not that I’m nostalgic for the days of three-channel French TV, but I did have a pang for those times when we had what you might call community viewing, when you could be sure that most of your friends watched the same show the same day and you could dissect it together and share the pleasure of anticipating the next episode. Realising this, no doubt, some distributors of major recent series, like Succession and White Lotus, also released episodes on a week-by-week basis.
The 1980s were the decade that saw the rapid transformation of French terrestrial television. To the three existing channels (then called TF1, Antenne 2 and FR3), were added France’s first subscription channel, Canal Plus in 1984, followed by Silvio Berlusconi’s La Cinq the same year, and then TV6 in 1986. TV6 was a “youth” music channel, but one year later was privatised under the Chirac government to become M6 (despite vigorous protests by musicians like Johnny Halliday, Serge Gainsbourg and Eddy Mitchell). TF1 was privatised the same year and acquired by the Bouygues Group.
New French TV channels inevitably brought in new blood and made a refreshing change for viewers who were beginning to complain of seeing the same faces in all the programmes. We saw more women news presenters at last, including Christine Ockrent and Anne Sinclair (though to this day there is a sad lack of racial diversity on French TV compared with, say, the BBC or its American counterparts).
The French have always enjoyed a good debate, particularly a polemical one, and one 80s TV gem was, Michel Pollack’s Droit de Réponse on TF1. The wide range of subjects covered and the often heated arguments that usually followed, with swear words flying, finally caused the show to be taken off the air in 1987, following insults to the channel’s new owner, Francis Bouygues.
Longer lasting was Apostrophe (Antenne 2), Bernard Pivot’s weekly book show. Launched in 1973, way before Oprah in the US, it ran until 1990, its success lying in the man himself: erudite but unpretentious, amusing and above all, possessed of an enthusiastic and infectious love of books. Authors from around the world were invited to the show, including Tom Wolfe, Normal Mailer, and Vladimir Nabokov, not to mention Pivot’s scoop with Solzhenitsyn, and the many politicians, musicians, and film stars, who came to discuss their own books or those they enjoyed. Pivot, who died in May 2024, was much-loved in France.
Following his show on Friday evenings, came my personal treat of the week: Ciné-club, presented by the owlish Claude Jean-Philippe. Back then this was the only opportunity to watch a classic movie in the original language on French TV! All foreign movies and series were dubbed (often badly), and VOST (Vérsion Originale sous-titré, the original language with sub-titles) was only available in art cinemas!
Le Bebete Show Exposition de marionnettes de la citadelle de Besançon 2013. Wikimedia Commons.
There were several excellent satirical shows, which, in the current political climate (and media ownership), barely exist. The Bébête Show launched in 1982 on TF1, portrayed French politicians as Muppet Show characters, with President Mitterand as a frog named Kermitterand, Jacques Chirac as Sam the Eagle, and the Communist Party leader Georges Marchais as Miss Piggy (Marchy la Cochone). Jean-Marie Le Pen, father of Marine, was as a Breton vampire. The show was presented by Stéphane Collaro, whose former office is currently occupied by Bill & Rosa’s Book Room and FUSAC!
Canal Plus provided non-encrypted viewing for 5 hours a day, giving non-subscribers access to some excellent and original shows, including Nulle Part Ailleurs hosted by Philippe Gildas and providing a big break for Antoine de Caunes. It combined news, a rather sexist but off-beat weather report, discussion and humour. It featured a group of comedians called Les Nuls, as well as the much loved Les Guignols de l’Info. This was a satirical puppet show loosely based on the British show ‘Spitting Image’. It was a great success, especially in the 1990s, but sounded the death toll for the Bébête Show. Sadly, Les Guignols was taken off the air a few years after Vincent Bolloré acquired the channel in 2015, along with Le Zapping, which showed clips of the best – and the worst – of the previous day’s TV.
Press conference with French humorist Coluche about the Restos du Coeur in Strasbourg on 20 February 1986. Source
From 1985-86 Canal Plus also (briefly) aired an iconic ‘news’ show by the controversial comedian, actor and satirist Coluche, who founded the charity Les Restos du Coeur. Coluche also ran as presidential candidate in the 1981 general elections. What started as a joke, gained unexpectedly wide support, leading him to withdraw, apparently under duress. He was killed in a motorbike accident in 1986, giving rise to several conspiracy theories.
It’s hard to believe today, but series took a while to catch on in France. Disparaged at the outset as being rather lowbrow, the télé-feuilleton, as they were first called, occasionally found a slot just before or just after the sacrosanct journal télévisé ( daily news show at 20h). However, in the 1980s American series, also dubbed, began to captivate the French (my ex in-laws in Grasse were hooked on Dallas), and soon local production began to improve, as did quality.
Canal Plus subscribers could at least watch movies in the original language, albeit late at night. The advent of VCRs (‘video cassette recording machines’, for those who never knew, or have long since forgotten such things), enabled people to record the show and pass the tapes on to their friends. A handful of wonderful English language cassette rental stores lurked in various corners of Paris, their names passed on by word of mouth [and FUSAC], making cross-town expeditions for weekend viewing a must. Tapes were soon followed by DVDs which provided both dubbed and VOST versions but required yet another player.
Children in the 1980s watched Récré A2 on the second channel (now France 2), later replaced by Club Dorothée on TF1. It featured the eponymous Dorothée doing a great deal of jolly singing and dancing, but also, some of the very first Japanese cartoons, as they were then called, on French TV, before words like manga and anime entered our vocabulary. These included Dragon Ball. Goldorak (Goldrake), and Ranma. At the time it was cheaper to import and dub Japanese shows than to produce them in France (in 1986 the quota was 60% for foreign imports vs 40% French production).
A Scrabble-type of game show called Des Chiffres et des Lettres, was, for reasons unknown, one of the longest running programmes on French TV (1972 to May 2024). It was beautifully parodied in a black-and-white, vowel-free Polish version by Les Inconnus (https://youtu.be/XBxIAkWJrv8?feature=shared), who made the best spoofs of French TV in the mid 1980s.
On Sunday mornings in the early ‘80s, two young women called Véronique and Davina launched an aerobic gym programme called Gym Tonic that soon topped 12 million viewers and got thousands of women hooked on exercising. Strange to think that up to then it had been largely a male preserve (women with children doubtless having less time to devote to such things!).
Of course French TV had popular variety shows, such as Drucker’s Champs Elysées and Jacques Martin’s Dimanche Martin. Also, Le Théâtre de Bouvard, presented by Philippe Bouvard*, the name being a play on words for théâtre du boulevard, meaning the popular farces typical of theatres on the Parisian Grands Boulevards; the theatrical equivalent of ‘easy listening’. From what little I glimpsed, the plays were mostly about unfaithful husbands or wives, generally caught lurking in cupboards or hiding under beds. But as more channels were added and the fist streaming channels appeared, there very soon came to be something for everyone. Except, it seems my granddaughter.
By Krystyna Horko, an old timer in Paris (since the early 80s). Krystyna is still looking for a new custodian for her mother’s 1955 seventeen volume British Encyclopedia Britannica.
© Krystyna Horko, 2024
* Philippe Bouvard, who at 94 still performs a weekly radio broadcast called Les portraits de Philippe Bouvard on RTL, has announced his retirement in January 2025 after he sets a world record for the longest number of broadcasting seasons on a radio station. Amongst his successes the erudite humorist with the impish grin lead « les Grosses têtes » for 37 years.