The French host Thierry Ardisson, creator of everyone talks about it, is dead

“Men’s friends in black, good evening!” “: Adept of interviews and shock formulas, the host and producer Thierry Ardisson, an impertinent and prolific figure of French television, died Monday at 76 years old.

Star of the small screen in the 1980s, Thierry Ardisson died in Paris following liver cancer, his wife and children announced in a press releaseAFP.

Thierry left as he lived. As a courageous and free man. With his children and mine, we were united around him. Until his last breathwrote his wife, the journalist of the TF1 television channel Audrey Crespo-Mara.

Always dressed in black-which earned him his nickname-and flanked by an eternal smile, Ardisson shaken the cathodic landscape with his successful evening talk shows.

Animator of Everyone talks about it In France

Alongside his acolyte Laurent Baffie, he had his best hours with Everyone talks about ita weekly program arrived on the France 2 public channel in 1998, where its questions caused a lot of ink.

If the diffusion of Everyone talks about it In France has ceased in 2006, the Quebec version of the show continues to shine every Sunday evening on here TV.

In 2024, to celebrate the 20th anniversary of Everyone talks about it And the 500th program, Guy A. Lepage had brought together around twenty personalities who marked the show, including Thierry Ardisson.

I think that [Tout le monde en parle] was a bit of the culmination of everything I had done before, I put everything in it, he had explained. There was an absolutely incredible mix of genres.

I’m not sure I would have wanted to do it for 20 years, but if I wanted […]I think I could have […]because it was 2.5 million viewers every Saturday eveninghe added.

Monday morning, Guy A. Lepage reacted to the death of Thierry Ardisson on the Facebook account of Everyone talks about it. He is a great character from French television who died todayhe wrote.

We have seen ourselves a few times for 21 years, he has always trusted me, he has always approved all the changes that I have made to his concept over the years. Happy that her show (her baby) crossed the oceanhe added.

A taste for provocation

Former advertiser who has the origin of slogans spent in posterity in France, Thierry Ardisson had applied advertising revenues to his programs.

For Guillaume Lespérance, producer of Everyone talks about itthis hard worker has revolutionized television with his audacity. He is someone who had a sense of spectacle and timingexplains the one who remembers a generous man with whom he spent a month before adapting the program in Quebec 22 years ago.

It was never flat with Ardisson, for better and for worse.

His interviews, sometimes to turn back, even intrusive, have established his reputation. The animator, who liked to disintegrate his guests, had a sense of the formula. Some rituals, such as its Good or Magneto, Serge!remain inseparable from his character.

When I arrived, there was a prude and compassey television language on the air. We began to speak as in life, sex, alcohol and drugshe pointed out.

Women have often paid the price for interviews – provocative according to some, sexist according to others – by Thierry Ardisson. The writer Christine Angot said he was humiliated several times on the set of Everyone talks about itby remembering laughter in front of the incest that she relates in her work.

In 2001, Quebec author Nelly Arcan was invited to Everyone talks about it To talk about his book Damn. Thierry Ardisson had suggested that he lose this Canadian accent Who was the thing less sexy With her, before asking her what she preferred in sex.

At the origin of several emissions concepts

After Everyone talks about itThierry Ardisson went to the controls of Hi Terriens (2006-2019), on private channels Canal+ then C8, which he had to stop after refusing to reduce the program’s budget.

Never short of concepts, he also presented 93, Faubourg Saint-Honoréeclectic dinners filmed at his home, in Paris Première.

In the 1980s and 1990s, the All-Paris went to his programs, including Midnightpresented from the nightclub of the Shower Baths in Paris, Black glasses for white nights to the legendary palace and Right bank / left bankfirst daily TV cultural magazine in France.

The veteran of the French audiovisual landscape had returned briefly in 2022 with Time Hotel On France 3, where he questioned deceased stars recreated thanks to new technologies.

Born on January 6, 1949 in Bourganeuf, in a rural region of the center of France, an engineer father and a housewife mother, Thierry Ardisson spent part of her childhood in Algeria, then in Catholic boarding school in the French Alps.

The man in blackhis latest book published in May, notably addresses his relationship to his family from a modest social background, which he did everything to overcome.

In 2020, it was the consecration with ArditubeYoutube channel launched by the National Audiovisual Institute (INA) and devoted to the impressive television heritage – 35 programs – of an animator with openly royalist convictions, little known for his modesty.

Multiple controversies

It was not just friends in the community: for literary critic Bernard Pivot, another star of French screens (died in May 2024), he was so megalo that he [croyait] having invented vulgarity on television.

During his last appearance on TV, May 10 in What an era! On France 2, he compared the current war in Gaza to Auschwitz, which had done controversial. He then asked forgiveness his Jewish friends.

The TV man was also a press patron, at the head of The Ebdo of the Savanes and monthly Interviewwith which he was sentenced for touting articles. He also made radio and produced series and films.

President Emmanuel Macron had given him the Legion of Honor in early 2024.

Married three times, Thierry Ardisson had three children with the musician Béatrice Loustalan. He shared the life of Audrey Crespo-Mara, which he had married in 2014.

With information from Nabi-Alexandre Chartier

With agency information France-Presse