After 52 years on the air, the show Numbers and letters will end at the end of the season and the score is not at all good for France Télévisions. If it’s just a game show and nothing is irreplaceable, the way the public channel has handled the show is really not classy.
It all started in 2023 when the show was removed from the weekday schedule to be relocated to the weekend. The legendary Bertrand Renard, the mustached king of mental arithmetic, and Arielle Boulin-Prat, with her dictionaries and fuchsia suits, were landed beforehand, in 2022, after respectively 47 years old and 36 years of consecutive fixed-term contract. A permanent contract was then refused to them by France Télévisions.
Sunday May 5, the program director of France Télévisions, the one who therefore decided to put Numbers and letters on weekends, explained in an interview that this new programming does not work. All this is missing an 8 letter word, all this lacks elegance. This ending could have been prepared and announced with a little more delicacy.
A television madeleine
Numbers and letters was a great time to doze off on the couch. If we sometimes wanted to give a little Red Bull to Laurent Romejko, for many, this show was also a little television madeleine which also made the chives work. All the channels want to rejuvenate their audience, but the fact is that the average viewer in France is around 60 years oldwe must not forget it.
Numbers and letters, there are also dozens of clubs all over France, tournaments all year round. There are also Facebook groups and enthusiast forums. The game has a life outside of TV and that will continue!
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