Thierry Ardisson, host and producer who marked the history of television for four decades, died Monday at 76 years old. Four years ago, the former advertiser returned for the team on his first coup in the media at the start of the years 80: a controversial interview with Yannick Noah who left traces …
A page in the history of French television turns. Thierry Ardisson, host and producer of many cult programs, died on Monday from liver cancer. He was 76 years old. During his long career which had started in advertising, he had also worked in the written press, pigeoning in particular for the monthly Rock & Folk. It was for this magazine that Thierry Ardisson interviewed a certain Yannick Noah in 1980.
Three years before he won Roland-Garros, the tennis player had received Thierry Ardisson and his colleague in his Parisian apartment to participate in “police descent”, a somewhat special concept of interview since he consisted in transforming the interview into interrogation after rewriting.
Drugs and doping
“The hashish, I really like,” said Yannick Noah in this interview in which it is a question of drugs and doping, the player notably citing Björn Börg and Victor Pecci. These words, “distorted” according to Yannick Noah, quickly have the effect of a small bomb in the world of sport to the point that Thierry Ardisson, then unknown to the public, must be explained to the 1 p.m. newspaper for what will be his first passage on television.
“He’s the type to go to Drucker or Delahousse rather than get bored at Ardisson!”
Forty-and-years later, in 2021, Thierry Ardisson returned to this episode in an interview with the Team. The opportunity to recall that he had not trapped Yannick Noah by making him drink (“we had drunk orange juice”). And above all to regret the resentment of the last French winner of a Grand Chelem tournament: “He is resentful like a baobab! He never wanted to speak to me again. One day, my friend Laurent Boyer organizes an evening in the reservoir. I fall on Noah and I say to him:” Listen Yannick, that’s okay, you said! “As the stars do,” never did it. ” And Ardisson de Tacler: “He’s the type to go to Drucker or Delahousse rather than get bored at Ardisson!”