Nothing is out of place at Gino Chouinard. Never a bad word; always well dressed, always that immaculate smile on your lips which lends to a good mood, even at 6:30 in the morning. Evil tongues will argue that there is perhaps something a little elaborate in this almost complex appearance of perfection. After all, this TV kid always dreamed of this career and did everything to achieve it. But the favorite host of Quebecers, who is preparing to leave the helm Hi hello after 17 years, swears he’s not trying to play the ideal son-in-law for the cameras.
“If I hosted a general public show like Hi helloit’s because I already had one casting which corresponded to the image of show. I know I’m not polarizing. No doubt there are people who would like me to be more confrontational, but that’s not me. I don’t like conflict. In everyday life, I try as much as possible to catalyze frustrations, to bring people together. Besides, I have never had an argument with anyone from the team,” confides the man who will host his last show on Friday.
Hi hello, which has existed since the end of the 1980s, will survive its departure. Ève-Marie Lortie will become the host this fall. But the fact remains that a trend has emerged in recent years: broadcasters are losing interest in the morning slot. There was a time when TVA also broadcast a talk show, then a cooking show in the morning. All this is now over. Hi hello now occupies the timetable alone until 10:30 a.m.
In other large networks, disinvestment is even more marked. Morning programming is mainly limited to children’s shows or poorly translated B-movies. “Yes, we feel a certain decline. But I don’t see how a show like Hi hello might not exist in ten years. The impact is still enormous. We are still very watched. The proof is that, since I announced my departure, there are many artists who have told me that a move to Hi hello had an immediate effect on their album or show ticket sales,” argues Gino Chouinard.
Take a moment to stop
The host says he has no plan for the fall. His decision to leave Hi hello is akin to a leap into the void. When he chose not to renew his contract two years ago, he felt the need to have some time for himself, without any specific plans, just to think about the next steps.
Television, both behind and in front of the camera, still interests him. Radio, where he cut his teeth, too. But working in the morning, this father of two gave. “It’s a lot of sacrifice. My daughter starts CEGEP next year. I only attended two school sessions, and that was because I had managed to take time off. Working in the morning makes us miss a lot of good times,” he emphasizes with emotion.
What’s more, the rush of current events weighs on him more than before. However, running a daily requires you to stay on the lookout for information all day long, to adapt the content of the next day’s program as you go. Leaving Hi hello, he feels the need to distance himself. He too is gripped by what some call “information fatigue”. The phenomenon has been documented since the end of the pandemic; more and more people who assiduously followed the news are now avoiding them, exasperated by their seriousness.
“I really feel like the news is heavier than before. However, when I started to animate Hi hello 17 years ago, there were also wars, murders, bad news… Except that we were only confronted with it when we read the newspaper or listened to a news bulletin. Today, with our cell phones, we are constantly confronted with it. It’s exhausting and that’s why, I think, among other things, that people are so on edge, that they are so polarized. Because we are always required to react in the moment to what is happening,” notes the host, who presented the weekend edition of Hi hello from 2003 to 2007, before succeeding Benoît Gagnon during the week.
People may say that we make our own luck, in reality, luck still has a lot to do with it. On the other hand, she’s not the one who keeps you in place.
The American dream
In more than 20 years in total Hi hello, Gino Chouinard will have spent more time on the air than anyone. Without doubt he was one of the highest paid personalities in the television industry in Quebec. But before getting there, the one that the public now simply calls Gino, as we also say Véro or Ricardo, also ate his black bread as a freelancer. At the end of the 1990s and the beginning of the 2000s, he was a columnist on all kinds of shows, at the Quebec station of TQS and even on Sweety salty. He remembers some weeks with just one $100 contract on the agenda.
“Money didn’t change who I was. Of course, at the SAQ, I buy a bottle for $25 or $30 and it doesn’t hurt. But that’s material. The material, yes, it can be comforting. But that doesn’t change the essential. It doesn’t change the empathy I have for others. That doesn’t make me forget that I come from a rural and modest background,” says Gino Chouinard, who grew up in Weedon, near Lac-Mégantic.
His father was a postman, his mother a seamstress. Suffice to say that nothing predestined him to become a huge television star. And yet, he never saw himself working anywhere other than in the media world. To make your way there as he did, you always need a little luck, he admits in hindsight.
“People may say that we make our own luck, in reality, luck still has a lot to do with it. On the other hand, she’s not the one who keeps you in place. For example, I was lucky to be hired at Hi hello. But it wasn’t luck that made me stay here for 17 years. It’s work,” he concludes with words that could inspire some.