Talk to the Snail by Stephen Clarke

Author:Stephen Clarke
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: ebook, book
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
Published: 2010-05-13T04:00:00+00:00

Prozac of the People

In July 2004, the head of France’s biggest commercial television channel, TF1, said that his programmes existed to sell Coca-Cola. Patrick Le Lay gave an interview declaring that TF1’s programmes ‘had a vocation to entertain the viewers and relax them between two commercial breaks’. And the astonishing thing is that despite this cynicism, his channel remained the most popular in the country, which says a lot about the discernment of the average French téléspectateur.

This flagrant desire to sell advertising space means that prime-time television in France is as exciting and varied as a nuns’ shoe shop.

At eight o’clock in the evening, the two main channels, TF1 and France 2, have their evening news. At around eighty forty p.m., the news finishes and an endless series of ads, broken up by weather, lottery results and the like, begins. Meanwhile, the other main channels, which air their news at different times so as not to compete, will have caught up and will be ready to begin the big prime-time show. At ten to nine or so, this main attraction begins, and won’t end until ten or ten thirty. If the viewers are lucky, it will be a movie, telefilm or documentary. More frequently, it will be either a reality TV show or some kind of panel game on which ageing stars and witless presenters will be given enormous microphones and told to laugh at each other’s anecdotes or old TV clips.

In France, the big handheld microphone is much more than a phallic symbol – it is a badge that tells the viewer, ‘I’m on TV and you’re not, peasant.’ The French do have lapel mics, but these are considered too small to be effective on the prime-time chat shows. Only if you are brandishing a silver cucumber will the viewer understand that you are a TV star and therefore by definition intelligent, witty and beautiful.

The French make good documentaries (which are, of course, on-screen opportunities to prove how right you are about something) and reasonable telefilms, especially detective stories that give them a chance to perpetuate the myth that their police are good at solving crimes. On the other hand, French TV producers do not understand the sitcom. They do make them, but they are more sit than com. This is mainly because they think TV is not a noble medium, but just a pale imitation of a cinema screen, a bit like a postcard of the Mona Lisa. Why ‘waste’ good writers and actors on something so short and frivolous?

But this attitude is just like France’s relationship with the hamburger – it’s not noble cuisine, but the French secretly binge on it whenever they can. At the time of writing there are three TV channels showing constant reruns of Friends, sometimes two or three episodes back to back, to fill the yawning gap left by the lack of decent French programmes.

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