“You realize, 37 years! It was one of the successes of my life and in any case, it’s part of my daily life since I had a show during the day and a show at night. And they weren’t small shows,” he recalled.
“A little performance”
Asked what he would like listeners to remember from his long career, Philippe Bouvard responded straight away: “Nothing at all. I don’t deserve to be remembered! I held my place for a very long time. Not too bad. That’s all. Goodbye and thank you. On the other hand, the journalist wants to tell listeners how lucky he was to have “privileged places” with them. Insisting that: “The listeners are faithful because I have been faithful.”
At 94, Philippe Bouvard, king of the airwaves and father of “Grosses têtes”, retires
As for his health, Philippe Bouvard confirmed that he was faced with “problems that we cannot believe have been resolved”, said he lost his sight five years ago and admitted that he sometimes had to “listen” to hear what was happening. we tell him. “The fact of getting older – and getting older considerably, because beyond 95, it’s still a small achievement anyway – well, that doesn’t happen without handicap and without the fact that people look at you with another eye and hear you with another ear,” he philosophized realistically.
At least 500 lives
First courier to FigaroPhilippe Bouvard elbowed his way to become a journalist. A profession that he held close to his heart throughout his life and which he knew how to reinvent, notably when he was boss of France Evening. The native of Coulommiers, in Seine-et-Marne, is above all the founder of Grosses Têtes, which from its creation, in 1977, became one of the flagship programs of French radio broadcasting. Long before Thierry Ardisson, it is also to him that we owe the appearance of talk shows in France, on the radio with “Saturday evening”, “Passsez soi moi voir” or even “Bouvard en liberté”, but also on television with “Le Théâtre de Bouvard”, which reveals a number of stars, starting with Les Inconnus or Chevallier et Laspalès. “I have had at least 500 lives because I have done all the jobs. They are different professional lives. Each time it was a different side of me”, summarized Philippe Bouvard on the occasion of the release of ‘a documentary dedicated to him, The Thousand and One Lives of Philippe Bouvard.
