Gérard de Suresnes: when Fun Radio created a “monster”

December 1995. That evening, Max, a rising star at Fun Radio, the favorite station of the younger generation, is having a nice chat with a middle school student who is suffering from heartbreak. His free daily broadcast, acclaimed by a very large audience and which follows another legendary show, the Lovin’Fun of Doc and Difool, is about to enter a new dimension with the grace of a simple phone call.

On the other end of the line, the voice is cavernous, and testifies to a blood alcohol level clearly above average. The man, who introduces himself as a former trucker, wants to recite love poems. The switchboard of the future Star System gets carried away, and Gérard will quickly become the darling of the listeners. He will even end up hosting a large segment of the show, once a week: these are Gerard’s debates.

The story will end badly. Very badly, even; By a “Heil Hitler!” chanted on the air without much finesse, and without any real intention either, by the man who had been renamed “Gérard de Suresnes”, in reference to the town in Île-de-France where he lived at the time. A painful term seven years after “radio dinner of idiots“, as Thibaut Raisse sums it up today, one of the thousands of teenagers who plugged in, every Thursday, with a Walkman screwed to their ears to listen to his excitement. And who is now publishing a book dedicated to the man who died in 2005, in the most abject poverty and indifference: The Midnight Cunt.

“I don’t want to do him justice, he assures. Just a tribute. When I heard he died so young (Editor’s note: 43 years old), and in this way, I told myself that the 15-year-old kid that I was had never been interested in who this man really was. But today, I am 40 years old and have a job that allows me to tell his story.”

A rather dramatic story, basically. Nourished by an impressive amount of details, Thibaut Raisse marks out the destiny of a willful but limited child, tossed between an unstable mother and the DDASS. That of a boy shattered by life. Then of an adult separated too early from his daughter, and whose solitude will lead him to alcohol.

Thrown out like that, his CV makes the treatment reserved on Fun even more cruel: that of a man invited on air to be mocked in public, on the airwaves of a national radio station. The truth is more complex, since this collaboration, most of the time voluntary, led Gérard Cousin (his real name) to lead an almost abnormal life in view of his condition – that of an outsider without a diploma, without a job, without social security.There are reasons to find this show scandalous; but there are reasons to think that it was an enchanted interlude.avoids cutting Thibaut Raisse. Thanks to her, he’ll spend every weekend in a club without spending a cent. He’ll sign hundreds of autographs for kids. He’ll travel, too: to Belgium (Editor’s note: he will spend a night in Namur, after an evening at the Ferme Blanche, a former well-known nightclub in the region), at the Cannes Film Festival and even in New York, where he rubbed shoulders with Jennifer Lopez and Nick Nolte! I think Gérard understood that the idea of ​​the show was to make fun of him. But he found it, in a way, to his advantage. So he had, in a way, his free will. Taking that away from him would be tantamount to taking away all his humanity..”

His crazy Belgian, Cannes and Hollywood adventures will not have saved Gérard from decline. No more than the relationship that united him with Max. A strange relationship, between love and revulsion, almost filial, with the host in the role of the father of his elder, 8 years older. Faithful to his habits since the end of the Star SystemMax, who has become… speaker for the French football team, refused to confide in Thibaut Draisse. Who is careful not to accuse him: “These are two characters who had no reason to meet: Gérard is a kid from an extremely disadvantaged background with a troubled childhood; Max is a privileged child who lives in a very chic suburb. And, as I also mention in the book, he also did a lot for Gérard. Putting him on the air was, in his eyes, a way of reintegrating him into society. But he gradually became horrified by the fact that Gérard, who was no angel either, did not want to take charge of himself. He did what he could with the means available to the young man he still was. But what was initially a bad joke probably ended up completely escaping him. And he found himself, paradoxically, in a kind of inability to stop it.“

The end of the story was probably predictable. For Gérard, it ended up at the bottom of a common grave, after a short agony due to illness. And while not many people at Fun Radio were thinking about the former Thursday night star: “IThere were few of them to ask for news, recognizes Thibaut Draisse. But in their defense, Gérard was not an easy person to help: he did not like to talk about his past, and he lied systematically about it. Many people did, in the end, try to help him, to get him out of poverty, to find him a stable job outside of these debates that were not real jobs, to write him a CV, to find him social security coverage. But he was not too damaged for that.“

His “fans” raised funds for his burial

It’s a bit of a crazy paradox: Gérard “de Suresnes” was, during his Fun Radio years, the idol of the young listeners of Fun Radio… but remained, all his life, a stranger to his own daughter. Roselyne, from whom he had been brutally separated – and partly by his own doing – when she was only 4 years old, only discovered his celebrity after his death.When she discovered her father’s showsreports Thibaut Draisse, he was already gone. She understood the principle of the show pretty quickly. And she took it all the worse when she realized that all these young people who called to make fun of her father had had access to him, while she herself had never had the possibility: she was not even aware that he had appeared on a show.”

However, it is thanks to her that his body will finally be exhumed from the common grave, before being given a “real” burial. To her… and to the €5,000 kitty funded by Gérard’s ex-fans.They even have a tendency to sanctify it a little.reports Thibaut Draisse.And maybe we should see there a form of slightly diverted guilt, the same one that, perhaps, led me to write this book. But the fact remains that the sum was quickly collected and that today. You know, there are even… pilgrimages organized between fans to go to Suresnes.“

As for his shows, they are still listened to on the web, notably on YouTube, where some archives have been (re)viewed more than 100,000 times: ” For a program that is over 25 years old, that’s huge! But you have to imagine that at the peak of their audience, Gérard’s shows, even though they were broadcast after midnight, were listened to by over 200,000 listeners. I don’t know how it is in Belgium, but in France today, a radio show broadcast at 8 p.m. brings together, at best, 60 to 70,000 listeners. He got triple that, and in the middle of the night!“

“A time heralding the excesses of Hanouna”

Beyond the personal and dramatic story of Gérard Cousin, it is also an era that Thibaut Draisse recounts with great talent inThe Midnight Cunt. And in particular the excesses observed since then, on social networks as well as on the radio or, of course, on television. We thus discover, in the course of a chapter, that Cyril Hanouna, much appreciated by Max (and vice versa), attended one of the shows hosted by Gérard. It is difficult, after that, not to see a kinship between Gérard’s debates and the way that the former star host of C8 regularly humiliates his columnists and guests.

” Beyond his destiny, Gérard is a journalistic object in his own rightthe author believes.First, he is the first anonymous person to receive such long and regular media exposure on a national media outlet. Then, of course, we can draw a parallel with Hanouna’s shows or, before him, those of Michael Youn, who also embodied this slightly naughty tone thanks to which one could easily fall into humiliation, even if it was “good-natured”. And then, what was also announced Gerard’s debatesit was the harassment made possible by the interactivity of these programs: Gérard’s number was revealed on air, some listeners discovered his address, and sometimes played dirty tricks on him. But it was still not on the same scale as what is experienced today by personalities who are exposed to the media on social networks, and who receive death threats a hundred times a day.“