Former TV columnist at La Presse | Louise Cousineau dies

Louise Cousineau, former TV columnist for The Presswhose pen was often dipped in vitriol, but who also knew how to distribute praise to those who made, according to his criteria, good television, left us on Monday.

During a career that spanned six decades, M^me Cousineau also worked for The Little Journalal, The homeland And TV Weeklyin addition to writing reviews on CKAC and 98.5 FM, notably with Paul Arcand.

Louise Cousineau passed away late Monday afternoon following health problems.

Some will remember above all a journalist who did not have her tongue in her pocket and whose acidity of certain column titles was matched only by their content. Examples abound.

“CTYVON’s experimental TV: the rats are us,” she wrote on September 13, 1989 about a humorous show piloted by Yvon Deschamps. “The Dutchman’s Mountain: a pretty Chinese soap opera,” she shouted on September 3, 1992 about this series which ran for just one season on Télé-Métropole (TVA). “ bye : bring Dominique back to us! », she demanded after the disappointing performance on December 31, 1975 where she looked at her watch “after 20 minutes”.

His own work colleagues have tasted his medicine. This was the case of columnist and screenwriter Réjean Tremblay after the second season of Throw and count. “Lance and… tell me a better story,” was the title at the end of opus 2 of the adventures of hockey player Pierre Lambert and his teammates.

“I was trying to be fair in my criticism. I would much rather love that than hate that,” she said to Marc Labrèche on June 6, 2020 on the show A lighthouse in the night that the host and actor had created on Radio-Canada radio at the start of the pandemic. She added that she had difficulty getting to sleep, some nights, after writing a very harsh column.

Marc Labrèche also admitted during this interview that he had been spared by this columnist who also knew how to be enthusiastic, generous, grateful and empathetic.

So, on December 2, 1997, after the last episode of the series Omertàshe spoke of “an extraordinary ending” and described the author Luc Dionne as a “diabolically clever man”.

Following the death by suicide of TVA journalist Gaétan Girouad on January 14, 1999, she said: “I wrote one day that he was my idol. Good TV journalists who are both intelligent and never stammer on the air are rare. »

Some of her columns were even tinged with an enthusiasm that turned against her. We think of that of November 22, 1990 when it introduced the reader, without giving any punch, to a scene from the series Caleb’s daughters when Émilie and Ovila are exhilarated watching two horses mate. His title ? “The most erotic scene on Quebec TV? » A passage of text suggested that “two million Quebecers will thrill with pleasure”.

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Louise Cousineau made a sensational entrance into the world of media following a serious accident on June 9, 1956, at Mount Washington. According to what is reported The small newspaperin its issue of 1^er July 1956, the future journalist fell 1,800 feet into a ravine. She “fell through trees, rocks and onto snow” before “escaping unscathed,” we read.

The story made the front page of the newspaper as well as a long report by Guy Lemay on page 35.

It’s difficult to say, more than 67 years later, if all these details are accurate. What is certain is that Louise had a better fate than her father, Doctor Azarie Cousineau, doctor at the Miséricorde hospital, killed in a plane crash at Lake Taureau in October 1949. Five people, including three Montreal doctors, died in this crash.

Shortly after the report dedicated to him The small newspaper, Louise Cousineau began her journalistic career in the same publication. We found an article signed by her on March 3, 1957. She reports that the actor Paul Dupuis (Ti-Coq, The beautiful stories of the countries above) refereed a match between two professional wrestlers, Golden Venus and Gypsy Daniels.

One of the bosses of this popular weekly was Jean-Charles Harvey.

We also found articles from M^me Cousineau in The homeland. Thus, on January 11, 1967, she told us that “Quebec is a ‘mission land’ for Mormons.”

The following year, again according to our research on the BAnQ website, she wrote her first texts in the daily newspaper on rue Saint-Jacques. She is not yet a TV columnist, but assigned to the general section. For a few years, she did a little bit of everything.

A text from May 21, 1968, perhaps his first, focuses on Montreal hairdressers who are asking for an extension of the decree governing their working conditions.

On January 13, 1970, a short article indicates that M^she Louise Cousineau was elected secretary of the Montreal Journalists Union, section The Press, whose president is Claude Masson, future deputy editor of the newspaper.

Two months later, Louise Cousineau found herself in Osaka, Japan, where she was among the journalists invited to visit the Universal Exhibition before its official opening. Already, his gaze is biting. Of the Quebec pavilion, she says it is “pleasant to look at but disappointing to visit.” She notes that there is little on the program and that around fifty paintings by Quebec artists are hanging in the cellar of the building.

Radio-television

M^me Cousineau began writing a column called “Radio-television” in March 1975. An adventure that would continue until the dawn of the 2010s, when she retired.

Why TV? Because it was not done, at least not regularly, in the French-language media. “In the French-speaking newspapers in Quebec, no one talked about television because everyone said it was good for thick people,” she told Marc Labrèche in the above-mentioned show. Whereas in English newspapers – I was married to a Brit at the time and we subscribed to The Gazette –, I read very funny, very amusing television columns. They didn’t take it too seriously. I told myself that I wasn’t smart enough to be a theater or literary columnist, so television was perfect for me. [rires]. »

Its 35 years will be woven with hundreds, even thousands of articles of great richness and peppered with a verb which has often been the torment of the people concerned and the delight of the readers.

She was to television what our colleague Claude Gingras was to classical music. The two, who worked opposite each other in the newsroom for a time, were good friends before falling out. They had this in common: they smoked in secret, late at night, when the room was practically deserted, hiding their ashtrays in a drawer, ignoring the rules.

Shocking? Wait ! In her farewell column, published on March 13, 2010 in our pages, she said: “The jar that we smoked in the sixties in the middle of the newsroom under the unsuspecting noses of our bosses. On a Monday morning, the weather forecast announced ‘Sunny tonight” “.

Defining herself in the same text as having “always had difficulty with authority”, she was nevertheless patron of the General Affairs section. It was she who, among other things, hired the columnist Yves Boisvert, impressed by his work during the summer internship for young journalists.

“I was lucky enough to fall on the right side of his human divide. That is to say not that of the ‟insignificant” (press the S), which mainly populate our planet, wrote Yves in a tribute text also dated March 13, 2010. That earned me some indulgences – yes, she is capable of it. »

At the end of the 2000s, M^me Cousineau had health problems. She did not write for a year in The Press before deciding to retire. A departure which did not take place in the best conditions, and she let it be known in her last column, entitled “We no longer have space! »

A few days after this publication, THE Montreal Journal announced that she was going to write 50 columns in the TV Weekly, which celebrated its 50th anniversary. “I’m terrified. Suddenly I could do it all,” she confided to journalist Dany Bouchard.

At the same time, she was delighted with this assignment. “It’s going to be one article per week, personalized, on shows from the period. That’s right up my alley. »

Since then, she had slowed down her activities quite a bit. His name has come up from time to time in the news. Like in June 2014 when she signed, with other personalities, a letter asking Prime Minister Stephen Harper not to reduce Radio-Canada’s budgets.

Mother of a daughter and grandmother, Louise Cousineau has, by all accounts, invented the model of the TV columnist as we have known it for several decades. She loved the small screen, which she watched accompanied by her dogs Benji then Mademoiselle Emma, ​​which she had adopted thanks to the initiative of Julie Snyder and her researcher Marc-André Chabot from Hell is the rest of us.

Beyond the raw material, television, and her columns, she kept her best memories for her companions on the third floor of 750, boulevard Saint-Laurent. Let’s give him the final word:

“We may have tripped over scoops, spent nights wondering if we were fooled, met extraordinary or abominable people, which is what I remember after all these years spent in The Press, that’s the pleasure I had there. »