In 2019, a big page in television has turned. That year, Patrick Sébastien hosted the final issue of Biggest Cabaret in the world on France 2 after twenty years of good and loyal service. The mountebank was in parallel ousted from the public channel after many disagreements. A sad end for him and the teams of the show who accompanied him all this time. Patrick Sébastien counted in particular on the complicity of Bernard Bilis to box his shows, a magician specializing in card tricks. The latter had become popular thanks to the show Hello it’s us! with Christophe Dechavanne before joining The Biggest Cabaret in the World.
Stopping the program was therefore necessarily a big blow for him too. “I started in 99 and finished in 2019. It’s sad because the show worked, because the public loved it. But it’s the audiovisual policy“, he regretted during an interview for Jordan de Luxe. Bernard Bilis then remembered the way in which Patrick Sébastien announced the bad news to him as well as their last moments spent all together. “What did he do ? He said that we stopped, that the contract was not renewed and then here we go. There was a closing party that he had organized and here it is sad. It’s sad to the extent that the formula could have evolved and I also think that we still had a few years to go and that we were not short of ideas“, he estimated.
Unfortunately, Delphine Ernotte, the director of France Télévisions, did not see it that way. According to her, the audiences were much too low and the program “aged a bit“as she had confided in the pages of the French version of the American magazine Forbes. Added to this was the poor understanding that had developed with Patrick Sébastien, who allegedly refused to modernize The Biggest Cabaret in the World. “I sincerely would have preferred him to tell us: ‘OK, I understand, we’re working.’ We’d still have it on the air“, she had assured. Very saddened, the host has long complained through the media of his departure and the end of this chapter of his life before, according to The Parisian, to bring France Télévisions before the commercial court, via its production company Magic TV, which had been in “a situation of economic dependence” since 1996. This had led to the dismissal of most of its employees. He claimed 5 million euros.
The full interview with Bernard Bilis can be found here.