Jean-Pierre Pernaut died on March 2, 2022, at the age of 71. A week later, on Wednesday March 9, 2022, his relatives gathered for his funeral at the Sainte-Clotilde basilica, in the 7th arrondissement of Paris: his wife and now widow Nathalie Marquay, their two children Lou and Tom, as well as his ex-wife Dominique Bonnet accompanied by Julia and Olivier, whom she had with the star of 13H. Several personalities, including many colleagues from TF1, had also made the trip. Nevertheless, a great absentee, Jacques Legros. He was Jean-Pierre Pernaut’s joker for more than twenty years and preferred to take the air that day. It’s his tribute to him…
He had a choice. And Jacques Legros made the decision not to attend the funeral of his colleague and friend, for a good reason. “Thierry Thuillier [le directeur de l’information, NDLR] asked me what I wanted to do. I didn’t think longhe says to Entertainment TV. I felt that as Jean-Pierre’s official joker for 25 years, my duty was to do the newspaperas I had to do when Jean-Pierre was not there. I was more useful there than at Sainte-Clotilde church.“
It was then that he presented the 1 p.m. television news on TF1 with great emotion, just like the day after the death of the late Jean-Pierre Pernaut… “I was told that I had a dirty head, that I seemed very tense. It’s true that we were all exhausted because we were destroyed. Honestly, I made the journal with closed fists“, he remembers about his JT of March 3. But another moment was even more painful for him: “The hardest was the day of the funeral. Because there was an infinite sadness. It was hard, it was hard… I’m a man, I can’t cheat, I have my emotions. But we still had to hold the boat. It was all the complexity of this JT.“
The disappearance of the lover of the regions has upset the whole of France. Jacques Legros remembers precisely the moment when he learned of his death. “I experienced it as a punch, an ‘uppercut’. We knew he was not well but we weren’t ready for that… We had a special bond (…). The info fell around 5 p.m. I immediately called my wife to tell her ‘Jean-Pierre is dead’“, he confides. Despite everything, he held his own against the viewers …