Do you have gossip? Are you true that? Have you heard of (star #1) secretly sleeping with (star #2), (star #3)’s wife?
To tell you the number of times I am asked these questions in a work week, it can be counted on the 12 fingers of 26 hands. And these gossip or echoes of Quebec showbiz interest the determined investigative journalist, the respected boss as much as the columnist adored by this newspaper which you read with avidity. Moreover, a little scoop here, Pierre Foglia was for a long time the most nosy of the entire editorial room of The Press. He loved knowing the most juicy facts about everyone, his fiancée and his sister.
Any good political, legal or sports journalist gossips, well yes, and small talk is essential in flushing out exclusive information. Breaking News: The scoops don’t magically arrive at your doorstep like a package from Amazon. You have to look for the nugget, validate it, polish it, then publish it, that’s the basis of the job.
Herself a gossip in withdrawal, Véronique Cloutier looks at gossip in her very good docuseries The rumor machine, which will land on Wednesday December 14 in the Véro.TV section of Tou.TV’s Extra. The three one-hour episodes, which I watched this week, will later be shown on Radio-Canada television, as Loto-Meno did it in the spring. The date was not specified.
The angle adopted by the moderator is interesting: are popular websites like Monde de stars or QC Scoop the heirs of the famous “yellow newspapers” of the 1960s?
Véronique Cloutier chatting with two veterans ofFeatured Echoes and Tele-RadiomondeRoger Sylvain and Érick Rémy, alias Monsieur Showbiz, as well as their 2.0 versions Simon Waddell of QC Scoop, Karl Hardy of Featured and influencer Brendan Mikan, who feeds his own social networks.
The gossip columnists of the old guard, which RBO has long parodied in its skits The 2 bitches, obviously have more perspective on their role and their impact in the artistic ecosystem. At the time, copy had to be sold, and no subject was taboo: Mireille Thibault’s weight loss, Michèle Richard’s new neck and even photos of celebrities taken in their coffin, yes, yes, a specialty of the intrepid Roger Sylvain, who also immortalized a colleague with AIDS on his deathbed.
No weekly magazine would publish this type of report today. Unlike the ferocious British tabloids, the Quebec artistic press has lost its scandalous side, which explains the explosion in popularity of a page like QC Scoop, which does not hesitate to put online sulphurous information that our pipoles are trying to hide. .
In the second episode, the best of three, Véronique Cloutier confronts Simon Waddell about the aggressive tactics of QC Scoop, notably in the romantic-family saga of singer Alicia Moffet and her boyfriend Frédérick Robichaud ofDouble occupationwhich has generated a lot of hate on the web.
As World of Stars, which systematically replicates the content of other media, would title it: “Simon Waddell makes shocking revelations and you will just be amazed”.
Whooping cough on Instagram and TikTok, Brendan Mikan specializes in tea on OD and does not hide it: yes, he likes to stir the cage and right the wrongs of stars whose speeches in public and in private do not tie up. He is the most honest and interesting of the three young gossips interviewed.
Over the three hours of The rumor machineVéronique Cloutier confesses Chantal Pary, Josélito Michaud (former editor of Monday) and Mario Pelchat on their ambiguous relations with artistic reviews. Michèle Richard appears very often in the editing of the episodes, she who sold the most copies ofWeekly Featured and company for the past 50 years.
With host Jean-Sébastien Girard, Normand Brathwaite is one of the few to affirm it without shame: “I like gossip, I like to tell it, even those about me”, he confides to Véronique Cloutier.
The “vintage” part of the docuseries fascinated me. In the 1960s and 1970s, Edward Rémy, founder ofFeatured Echoes and dad of Érick Rémy, lived six months a year in Acapulco, the Côte d’Azur of Quebec.
All the Quebec gratin (Claude Blanchard, Denise Filiatrault, Dominique Michel, Tex Lecor) sunbathed there, providing gold equipment to Mr. Rémy, who then filled pages and pages of his magazine with wacky stories like “Michèle Richard : attacked by a shark”.
Yes, these yellow newspapers invented stories, including the “false” marriage between Michèle Richard and Michel Louvain. Today, several Quebec publications allow stars to proofread the articles and choose the photos themselves before printing. We are far from the American paparazzi, let’s say.
According to sociologist Jean-Philippe Warren, the origin of the verb gossip dates back to the 17e century, in Normandy. To keep warm while they were spinning on winter evenings, Norman seamstresses placed potine at their feet, a kind of terracotta hot water bottle that contained embers. As a group, they would knit and gossip about the inhabitants of the village without freezing their toes, in short, they gossiped.
We spend 50 minutes a day gossiping, chatting. Gossip has no social class or gender. So stop lying to yourself. It’s okay to memorize. And it’s normal to want to know that (star #4) snorted so much cocaine that she can’t smell anything anymore.