Much praise rained on the host Michel Désautels over the weekend after the announcement of his retirement from the airwaves next June. Many salute his background culture, his mastery of the language. Soon, we will no longer hear on the Première Chaîne, Desalts on Sunday, his beautiful calm voice, his relevant reflections, his interviews on a thousand subjects: national or international news, culture from here or elsewhere, sport, environment, new social challenges. To be interested in everything is to radiate, to make others want to learn more, to open the game by putting the cards on the table.
People realize that they will lose something when Désautels drops the microphone at Radio-Canada. Yes, but what, exactly? By dint of thinking about it, some measure the chasms dug on the radio over the years between certain professionals from a rigorous school – caught up in age, leaving one after the other – and presenters with different codes, less seasoned, more familiar with their listeners, more modern, in short. The fact remains that the latter often pour too much laughter into our ears, too many choruses of giggles in pure cacophony.
Sometimes approximate knowledge on the subjects covered is difficult to hide. Transmission failures and the computer revolution have transformed minds. Generational gap and societal mirror. Yes, Quebec has changed. The announcement of this departure, which is added to others, cries the evidence. Tomorrow, will these potholes be sealed? Not this way, anyway. We would like young people to keep opportunities to become better informed. True, they are hardly the biggest consumers of radio. All the same…
To have 50 years of Radio-Canada behind the tie is to attach one’s roots to a company which by vocation was intended to be a quality forum wishing to lead Quebecers towards knowledge, reflection, the chastised French to be shared. Frequentation of the golden ages leaves traces and helps an animator to keep one foot in history. Over the course of Désautels’ career, the educational mission was dissolved at the Première Chaîne, without being completely erased. At a time of triumphant populism, woe to those who might seem more evolved or cultured than the average citizen, by daring to invite them to enlighten their minds! Knowledge is no longer an ideal to be achieved, the level of language declines accordingly. And the ratings, those tyrannical censors, have the power of life and death over the broadcasts. We even see veterans lowering their level of knowledge and language to better woo the audience. Everyone claims, hand on heart, to come to the aid of the threatened French, but on the air, many are those who let their guard down. Franglais makes its way onto many lips. The thinness of several cultural baggage is perceptible at the microphone. What’s the point of bothering with it? wonder voices. Who encourages them to fly higher, exactly?
The career host on the small screen as well as on state radio represents a world that is slowly fading away. It is necessary, they say, to develop a promiscuous journalism on the air, to serve familiar words to each one, to utter little cries or to go into great ecstasy, just to keep your fickle audience listening. We understand. The public, exhausted by the crises and frightened by the challenges of the future, wants to laugh, to relax, to feel emotions in bursts, to get drunk, to be indignant, to spit out, to zap. Above all, avoid digging in the coco for a long time on a complex subject that has shaken certainties. However, Désautels does not need a thousand stratagems to capture attention on Sunday mornings. He treats his listeners as intelligent beings, vulgarizes without infantilizing. Another winning formula. Others are keeping up. But the bulk of mentalities is elsewhere. It shows. You can hear it.
Several, on the radio and on TV, send us face to face with the changes in our societies. Not just in Quebec. In France, the level is also declining, invaded by celebrity gossip and popular English words. In the United States, civilizational chasms have been deepening for a long time. The West no longer knows what to do with its legacies, good or bad. He erases them, he veils them under the wind of the day, like, at the Place des Arts, the spectacle December on Quebec traditions, in loss of amphitheater. Instantaneity sweeps away memories.
So when a truly professional animator announces that he is stepping down, we are sorry. We think we lose, and it’s true. It remains, for the rest of things, to demand that the average level of quality be raised on the air. If only to keep streetlights burning in the way of posterity.