Retirement soon for Philippe Bouvard: the tireless 94-year-old journalist, who still writes a weekly column on RTL, announced Sunday June 23 that he would cut the microphone in January 2025, on the occasion of his sixtieth birthday at antenna. RTL, radio of the M6 group, saluted its emblematic figure and its « record mondial » of “the host who has done the most seasons on a station”.
Journalist and entertainer with “Les gros têtes”
“There is a temptation, which is not a temptation of laziness, but a temptation of record, it is to go until January 1st, it will not be bad enough, and then to listen to the others and to be silent »explained Philippe Bouvard on RTL. “Because on January 1, I will have established the double record that I hoped for, that is to say 60 years of radio and 60 years of RTL,” justified the one who started in 1965 at Radio Luxembourg, which became RTL in 1966, before launching “Les Grosses têtes” there in 1977 and making it the most listened to program in France.
“I really liked the radio, and the radio did it well for me”, concluded the journalist who looks back on moments that forged his career in “Les portraits de Philippe Bouvard”, Sunday at 6:40 a.m. on RTL. Philippe Bouvard has also written a column in the monthly magazine for four years VSD and is preparing a 70th book, titled Retirement ? Not an end of life, but the beginning of a new existenceaccording to a recent interview granted to the daily Was-Matin.
Journalist and public entertainer with “Les gros têtes”, Philippe Bouvard accompanied the French for sixty years on the radio before announcing this retirement which he refused for a long time. When in September 2014, after thirty-seven years at the helm, he had to give up his place to Laurent Ruquier, called to rejuvenate the show, Bouvard, close to 85 years old, had a bad experience.
“The little theater of Bouvard” on Antenne 2
Tireless and always up to date with current events, despite his failing eyesight and hearing, Philippe Bouvard still has a page in the magazine at the age of 94 VSD, as well as a Sunday column on RTL. He boasts of having always been hyperactive: 30,000 articles, 6,000 TV shows, he recorded in the daily newspaper at the start of 2013. Nice morning with whom he collaborated. On television, from 1982 to 1987, he presented “Le petit théâtre de Bouvard” on Antenne 2, a sketch show where young actors tried their hand, several of whom were successful (Muriel Robin, Pascal Legitimus, Mimie Mathy, Chevallier and Laspalès…).
Born on December 6, 1929 in Coulommiers (Seine-et-Marne) to a couple of small traders, Philippe Bouvard entered the Figaro in 1952 as an errand boy, after a short stint at the Journalists’ Training Center. He climbed the ranks, signed the society column and became director of Parisian services. In 1973, he left Le Figaro pour France Evening, where he held several hierarchical positions and wrote a front-page article for years. He will also be technical advisor to L’Express and columnist at Paris Match.
“A little misogynist, a little xenophobic”
Editor-in-chief at RTL in 1968, he launched “Les gros têtes” on April 1, 1977. His guests, personalities, had to find the answers to “glues” posed by listeners. As the months go by, the cultural argument gives way to Gallic humor and below-the-belt jokes. The daily show is a resounding success. “Even if I claim a certain complacency in the register of the fly, the exercise is more perilous than it seems. In radio, a good word that comes five seconds too late is no longer a good word.declares the one who cited Coluche, Desproges and… Cioran as his favorite comedians.
The man, with a round and jovial physique, mocks the taxman, rails against the contempt he says he suffers from the intelligentsia, and later concedes that he “maybe a little misogynistic”. In 1996, he was convicted of provoking racial hatred following a riddle asked during a “Big Heads” television show. “I am and remain an average Frenchman, grumpy, chauvinistic, a little xenophobic”he declared to Parisian in 2022. Passionate about gambling and writing, Philippe Bouvard lives on the heights of Cannes, with Colette, his wife of more than seventy years.
