Friday, February 17, 2023, viewers of C8 will be able to find Laurent Fontaine and Pascal Bataille in “Only the truth matters”. Each week, the iconic duo takes pleasure in sharing the best sequences of the show that has become cult over the decades! In the past, the two animators offered their services at TF1. But it was in 2006 that everything stopped for them.
Sensitive to current topics, they did not always agree with the production to box certain numbers of the program! For the Podcast “Radar” broadcast on RTL, Laurent Fontaine and Pascal Bataille have agreed to lift the veil on the various pressures they were subjected to within the first channel. “You know, for example, we were the first to show a gay couple kissing on TV. TF1 waged war on us every week to tell us to stop showing queers on TV”, revealed Pascal Bataille to our colleagues. And to specify: “What we were told in real life, in the meetings, was this: ‘Stop showing the fags, you lose 700,000 viewers when you show a couple of fags'”.
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“We held on…”
Despite the tackles against them, Laurent Fontaine and his sidekick did not want to let go: “We said: ‘No, we’re not going to stop because we think it’s good, that this show should also be used for that’. It was a fight, but we held on”. After the stop of the emission, the principal interested parties continued their collaboration. In 2009, for example, they even launched a television school.
However, Laurent Fontaine and Pascal Bataille moved away – for a while – to find each other better. “We haven’t seen each other less for three, four years, for reasons that are very much linked to politics, and geographical distance”, indicated Laurent Fontaine facing Eric Dussart. “I supported the current president (Emmanuel Macron editor’s note) when he was campaigning in 2016. Pascal was very violent, in my opinion…”. Fortunately, the two presenters ended up ignoring their differences!
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