The public audiovisual group, on the other hand, has reversed course on “Le magazine de la santé”, which it had announced would be removed after 25 years on screen but which will ultimately be extended on France 5.
This will not be the case for “Des figures et des lettres”: a daily meeting place for the French, bringing together generations of viewers at snack time since 1972, it was already only broadcast on weekends since the back to school 2022.
But this programming on Saturday and Sunday “was not crowned with success”, noted the director of antennas and programs of France Télévisions, Stéphane Sitbon-Gomez, in an interview with the Tribune Dimanche.
“We should have stopped two years ago”
“After fifty years of existence, it is an emblematic meeting,” he admits. “It’s a difficult decision, but we have made the choice to stop this program.” If stopping broadcasts is “part of the normal life of all channels”, according to him, the deprogramming of “Numbers and Letters” marks the end of an era.
“We should have stopped two years ago. Weekend programming was the chronicle of a foretold death,” reacted, moved, to AFP Patrice Laffont, the first presenter of the game and producer .
“Fifty years of broadcasting, it will never exist again! It was a very special broadcast, based on very simple criteria that the French learn at school, numbers and letters,” he added, specifying that he had been received by the group who had told him the news.
First called “The Longest Word”, the show quickly became cult on Antenne 2. After Patrice Laffont or Laurent Cabrol, Laurent Romejko is at the helm of PAF’s oldest show, after “Le jour du seigneur”, for thirty years.
Everything is cult: the mental arithmetic test, “the count is good”, the vocabulary test with its alternating selection of consonants and vowels, the credits music (“Western Patrol”) which appeared in 1972.
The principle has not changed, even if the last few years have been more turbulent, marked in particular by the departure of Bertrand Renard and Arielle Boulin-Prat, the Mr. Figures and the Mrs. Letters of the game, ousted in mid-2022 and who have since then attacked France Télévisions in the industrial tribunal.
The “1,000 euro game” as a replacement
“Numbers and Letters”, which is also one of the oldest shows in Europe, has been exported to many countries, from Belgium to Australia. Several tens of thousands of candidates participated and hundreds of clubs exist, outside of TV, with their tournaments or their champions.
“A goodbye show will bring together Patrice Laffont and Laurent Romejko (the first and last presenters of the game, Editor’s note) and will thank all the teams,” added the director of the France Télévisions channels.
The place on France 3 for the emblematic game, on Saturday and Sunday at 5:15 p.m., will now be occupied by the television adaptation of another emblematic program from Radio France, “The game of 1,000 euros”, until now broadcast only on SATURDAY.
Furthermore, France 5 will finally keep “Le magazine de la santé”, whose deletion announced after 25 years on the air had sparked a wave of protests expressing alarm at the end of a popular science program on health and medicine .
Certain broadcasts renewed
Nearly 170 personalities, including the former Minister of Health Agnès Buzyn and the pulmonologist Irène Frachon, judged that “saving +The health magazine+ is a public health duty”, in a column in Le Figaro. This program will now be presented by Jimmy Mohamed alone, without Marina Carrère d’Encausse.
Stéphane Sitbon-Gomez also announced the non-renewal of much more recent programs such as “Bertrand n’a pas slept” or “En bande organised”, “because they have not fully found their audience”.
“On the other hand, many recent programs are being renewed, such as ‘Cmedia’ (France 5) and ‘Bel et bien’ (France 2). We will also continue our strategy aimed at young audiences by investing in Twitch platform from the start of the school year,” he continued.
